Stellar Lumens (XLM) holders have plenty of reasons to be happy about the future of their holdings
Stellar Lumens experienced a decent breakout in the month of July, one that was initiated by Coinbase announcing its intention to look into adding this coin to its portfolio. July managed to recoup some of June’s losses, but XLM still remains over 60% in the red for the entire year. After falling fairly low on July 12th, reaching $0,180214 USD/2906 satoshi, XLM saw some strong upwards movements in the following days which helped it reach a monthly BTC high of 4262 satoshi. USD high came along couple of days later, on July 26th, when one Stellar Lumens was tradable for $0,347832 USD. The coin has since stagnated somewhat, just slowly bleeding out without any significant upwards movements.
Right now, one XLM coin is priced at August lows of $0.207452 USD (9.69% drop in the last 24 hours)/0.00003241 BTC (4.59% drop in the same time frame). Stellar is known for having one of better trade volumes on the market, as it currently sports 7,236 BTC of daily trade activity. With a market cap of $3,826,028,036 USD it also is one of the most valuable (6th, to be exact) projects on the market. TradingView user TotoParasca offers the following analysis of the coin’s technical situation:
Stellar is very close to the lower trend-line formed by the two all-time lows (very strong). In this regard it will be the first attempt to break it down considering the 2 points as supporting, therefore a cross now is very unlikely and another wave bounce to the high trend-line is more probable.
This impressive project that recently turned 4 years old has been mildly busy in the last couple of weeks. Since we last covered them, Stellar visited their first Indonesian meet-up, where they presented their cross-border payments abilities and ideas alongside their long term partners PundiX and Chynge. These partnerships have always been one of their key selling points, as various companies are already cooperating with Stellar on the development of blockchain technologies and solutions. IBM is probably the most important of the bunch.
What is the difference between Ripple and Stellar Lumens?
The IBM partnership has a long standing history, as it was announced back in October of 2017. IBM’s Vice President Jesse Lund said back then that XLM will be used as a real-world payment method on his company’s blockchain related products (IBM is a major supplier of banking hardware with over 30 banks on their list of associates). More importantly, it seems that IBM has no plans of creating a native blockchain, meaning that XLM will be the main currency of the IBM/Stellar backed project called Universal Payment Solution. This solution will look to combine XLM’s frictionless blockchain with IBM’s banking world focused products, possibly creating a cross-border payments platform that will blow Ripple out of the water.
This partnership has already spawned results, as a stablecoin called Stronghold was launched on top of the XLM’s blockchain, with the backing of IBM. IBM’s partner Veridium Labs is also looking into creating a XLM-based token called Verde. This token is designed to give enterprises with high pollution rates the opportunity to offset environmental damage by supporting the Indonesian rainforest.
Another project called Tides will be looking to take advantage of Stellar’s cheap-for-developing-on blockchain whose fees are much lower than those that more established projects like Ethereum require. The TIDE token will run on Stellar’s blockchain and will allow the participants to create autonomous health insurance pools. Once inside of these pools people will be able to make payments, file claims, and vote on pool matters while receiving a healthcare experience completely free of middlemen. Such a project will be looking to bring fairness and peer-to-peer interaction to the way we pay and receive our healthcare, and this approach is definitely in line with Stellar’s core ideas.
The list doesn’t stop there, SatoshiPay, Tempo, Slice, mentioned Chynge, TillBilly, Deloitte, Sure Remit and Open Garden are among those that proudly boast about being a part of it. The last one, Open Garden, was one of the finalists of the Stellar Build Challenge, a competition meant to spawn a wave of useful projects and apps that will run on top of the XLM’s blockchain. Open Garden allows people to turn their phones into Wi-Fi hotspots and then get paid for sharing their bandwidth. Stellar clearly has a long term vision with this challenge as a new round has just recently been announced. Any interested developers can follow the link posted in the sentence prior to find out more about the project.
Stellar has had a couple of smaller updates along the way. KuCoin started sending out e-mails that XLM has been officially listed on their platform. At the same time, there are rumors that the coin might be listed on BitPanda around 9th of August. This added market exposure has helped the coin tremendously, and certainly played a part in pushing Stellar along the way of reaching 700 thousand unique wallets.
#StellarLumens approaching 700k + Wallets!
Quiet community, but the stats are real!#XLM $XLM #STELLAR is the next #altcoin to boom!$BTC $ETH $TRX $OCN $XRP $DASH $XEM $ADA $LTC $BANCA $ECA $COLX $EOS $HOT $ETC $VEN $ZIL $EXRN $XP $BABB $DRG $BCH $XLM $IOTA $NEO $XMR $OMG pic.twitter.com/XpuYqDdEhP
— MasterTrader777 (@ToshiDesk) August 6, 2018
There’s little to say about Stellar that many similar articles haven’t said before. The project is sound and integration/adoption are on their way; “Lumenauts” should have plenty of reasons to be happy about the future of their holdings.
