Stellar empowers builders to unlock human and economic potential. It combines a powerful, decentralized blockchain network with a global ecosystem of innovators to create opportunities as borderless as ideas.

Stellar

stellar

Blockchain Bridges Gaps Where Traditional Finance Fails, Says Stellar Development Foundation

Blockchain ukax kawkhantix qullqichasiw tradicional ukax jan walt’ayaski uka chiqanakanw ch’amanchasi, Fundación Stellar Development ukax siwa

Blockchain преодолява пропуските там, където традиционното финансиране се проваля, казва Stellar Development Foundation

Stellar Development Foundation: Blockchain schließt Lücken, wo traditionelle Finanzsysteme versagen

La tecnología blockchain cierra brechas donde las finanzas tradicionales fallan, afirma Stellar Development Foundation

ステラ開発財団によると、ブロックチェーンは従来の金融がうまく機能しない部分を補う

ბლოკჩეინი ახიდებს ხარვეზებს, სადაც ტრადიციული ფინანსები ვერ ხერხდება, ამბობს Stellar Development Foundation

Blockchain Салттуу Каржы ийгиликсиз болгон жерде боштуктарды толтурат, дейт Stellar Development Foundation

ብሎክቸይን ባህላዊ ፋይናንስ ኣብ ዝፈሽለሉ ክፍተታት ይድልድል ይብል ስቴላር ዲቨሎፕመንት ፋውንዴሽን

“Stellar” gaznasynyň aýtmagyna görä, adaty maliýe şowsuz bolan “Blockchain” köprüleri

Blockchain Yi Bula Swivandla Laha Timali ta Ndhavuko ti Hlulekaka, Ku vula Stellar Development Foundation

Блокчейн усуває прогалини там, де традиційне фінансування зазнає невдачі, каже Stellar Development Foundation

恒星发展基金会称区块链弥补了传统金融的不足

Stellar Community Fund Drives Innovation in Blockchain Development The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) is set to launch Cohort 9 of its Kickstart Program, providing developers and founders with an exceptional opportunity to build, launch, and scale their projects on the Stellar network. Since the launch of the Soroban smart contract platform in May, the Kickstart Program is also open to builders working on DeFi projects and other decentralized applications. Applications for the Kickstart program are now open and will close on November 17, 2024, with the program running from December 2-6, 2024. Kickstart Program - 5-Day Virtual Accelerator The SCF Kickstart program is a structured, five-day virtual boot camp that provides early-stage developers and founders with hands-on mentorship and a path to potentially access funding from the Stellar Community Fund. This program is specifically designed for participants who have a concept and want to transform their ideas into tangible projects built on Stellar. Each day of the program focuses on a key development area: December 2, 2024 - Define Your Minimum Viable Product
December 3, 2024 - Create a UI/UX Mockup
December 4, 2024 - Outline Technical Architecture
December 5, 2024 - Develop a Go-to-Market Strategy
December 6, 2024 - Pitch Your Product to Industry Experts After completing the Kickstart boot camp, developers can apply for the SCF Kickstart Award, potentially earning up to USD $15,000* in XLM to validate and develop their projects. Projects that demonstrate initial traction may then become eligible for the SCF Build Award. Build Program - Roadmap To Launch The SCF Build Program supports projects that have moved beyond the concept phase and are ready to scale toward market launch. Offering up to USD $150,000* in XLM, this award assists teams with development costs, community integration, and resources needed to finalize their products. The Build Program benefits include: Financial Support - Up to six months of development costs
Access to Stellar LaunchKit - Includes audit credits, infrastructure offers, and additional funding mechanisms
Community Integration - Stellar actively supports partners and developers on the network To apply, teams must submit a detailed proposal outlining their project goals, budget, and how they meet eligibility criteria. The application process includes community voting and a panel evaluation, with funding distributed in tranches based on development milestones, ensuring projects stay on track. How To Apply Developers interested in joining the Kickstart program can apply at: https://communityfund.stellar.org/kickstart. Following the November 17th, 2024 deadline, selected participants will receive preparation materials and guidance from the Stellar Development Foundation and the SCF team. Teams that complete the Kickstart program and demonstrate project potential will have the option to scale further with the SCF Build Award. The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on the day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker XLMUSD_RR) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook. Stellar Community Fund Drives Innovation in Blockchain Development The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) is set to launch Cohort 9 of its Kickstart Program, providing developers and founders with an exceptional opportunity to build, launch, and scale their projects on the Stellar network. Since the launch of the Soroban smart contract platform in May, the Kickstart Program is also open to builders working on DeFi projects and other decentralized applications. Stellar Community Fund (SCF) Stellar Community Fund (SCF) Soroban smart contract platform Soroban smart contract platform Applications for the Kickstart program are now open and will close on November 17, 2024, with the program running from December 2-6, 2024. Kickstart Program - 5-Day Virtual Accelerator The SCF Kickstart program is a structured, five-day virtual boot camp that provides early-stage developers and founders with hands-on mentorship and a path to potentially access funding from the Stellar Community Fund. This program is specifically designed for participants who have a concept and want to transform their ideas into tangible projects built on Stellar . Stellar Stellar Each day of the program focuses on a key development area: December 2, 2024 - Define Your Minimum Viable Product December 3, 2024 - Create a UI/UX Mockup December 4, 2024 - Outline Technical Architecture December 5, 2024 - Develop a Go-to-Market Strategy December 6, 2024 - Pitch Your Product to Industry Experts December 2, 2024 - Define Your Minimum Viable Product December 3, 2024 - Create a UI/UX Mockup December 4, 2024 - Outline Technical Architecture December 5, 2024 - Develop a Go-to-Market Strategy December 6, 2024 - Pitch Your Product to Industry Experts After completing the Kickstart boot camp, developers can apply for the SCF Kickstart Award, potentially earning up to USD $15,000* in XLM to validate and develop their projects. Projects that demonstrate initial traction may then become eligible for the SCF Build Award. Build Program - Roadmap To Launch The SCF Build Program supports projects that have moved beyond the concept phase and are ready to scale toward market launch. Offering up to USD $150,000* in XLM, this award assists teams with development costs, community integration, and resources needed to finalize their products. SCF Build Program SCF Build Program The Build Program benefits include: Financial Support - Up to six months of development costs Access to Stellar LaunchKit - Includes audit credits, infrastructure offers, and additional funding mechanisms Community Integration - Stellar actively supports partners and developers on the network Financial Support - Up to six months of development costs Access to Stellar LaunchKit - Includes audit credits, infrastructure offers, and additional funding mechanisms Community Integration - Stellar actively supports partners and developers on the network To apply, teams must submit a detailed proposal outlining their project goals, budget, and how they meet eligibility criteria. The application process includes community voting and a panel evaluation, with funding distributed in tranches based on development milestones, ensuring projects stay on track. How To Apply Developers interested in joining the Kickstart program can apply at: https://communityfund.stellar.org/kickstart. https://communityfund.stellar.org/kickstart . https://communityfund.stellar.org/kickstart Following the November 17th, 2024 deadline, selected participants will receive preparation materials and guidance from the Stellar Development Foundation and the SCF team. Teams that complete the Kickstart program and demonstrate project potential will have the option to scale further with the SCF Build Award. Stellar Development Foundation Stellar Development Foundation The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on the day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker XLMUSD_RR) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook. The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on the day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker XLMUSD_RR) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR ). Learn more in the SCF Handbook . https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR SCF Handbook SCF Handbook

Can The Stellar Accelerator Kickstart Your Web3 Idea?

Може ли Stellar Accelerator да стартира вашата Web3 идея?

¿Puede el acelerador Stellar impulsar su idea Web3?

L’accélérateur Stellar peut-il donner un coup de fouet à votre idée Web3 ?

Կարո՞ղ է Stellar Accelerator-ը սկսել ձեր Web3 գաղափարը:

Stellar Accelerator は Web3 のアイデアを始動させることができますか?

Na The Stellar Accelerator e ka Kickstart Kgopolo ya Gago ya Web3?

Czy akcelerator Stellar może dać początek Twojemu pomysłowi na Web3?

Dardariyaha Stellar ma bilaabi karaa fikradaada Web3?

Може ли Стеллар Аццелератор покренути вашу Веб3 идеју?

“Stellar Accelerator” Web3 ideýaňyzy başlap bilermi?

Stellar Accelerator Web3 Fikrinizi Harekete Geçirebilir mi?

Ngaba i-Stellar Accelerator iyakwazi ukuqala imbono yakho yeWeb3?

Everything You Need to Know Before Building on the Stellar Blockchain

Hey Hackers! Welcome back to another edition of HackerNoon’s Company of the Week! This series aims to give tech companies from our database the big bright spotlight they rightfully deserve. And this week, we have another great one in store. Everyone, meet Stellar: A decentralized public blockchain that helps developers set up various payment options. Want to be featured on HackerNoon’s Company of the Week? Request Your Tech Company Page on HackerNoon! Meet Stellar Founded in 2014, Stellar helps builders integrate payment systems into any application. On their website, people can learn how to set up instant global payments, digital wallets, and help them create smart contracts. And if that’s not enough to show how great Stellar is, why don’t we hear from them? From Stellar’s Docs: Stellar is a layer-1 open-source, decentralized, peer-to-peer blockchain network that provides a framework for developers to create applications, issue assets, write smart contracts, and connect to existing financial rails.
Stellar is designed to enable creators, innovators, and developers to build projects on the network that can interoperate with each other. Stellar <> HackerNoon Tech Community The HackerNoon community has written about Stellar for many years. A ton of great stories have been written about how Stellar works, the history of Stellar, and how to implement it into your projects. Check out some of them below! Why Stellar could be the next big ICO platform
Stellar $XLM Wiki: Coin History, Techstack, and Crypto News
Stellar Blockchain is the right platform for building next-gen FinTech Products. Here’s why Like 4000+ other brands, you can also benefit from publishing on HackerNoon:Learn more about HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program
Learn about our Technology Press Release Program. And that’s it for this week’s edition! We hope to see you next week! - The HackerNoon Team Hey Hackers! Welcome back to another edition of HackerNoon’s Company of the Week ! This series aims to give tech companies from our database the big bright spotlight they rightfully deserve. HackerNoon’s Company of the Week And this week, we have another great one in store. Everyone, meet Stellar : A decentralized public blockchain that helps developers set up various payment options. Stellar Want to be featured on HackerNoon’s Company of the Week? Request Your Tech Company Page on HackerNoon! Want to be featured on HackerNoon’s Company of the Week? Request Your Tech Company Page on HackerNoon ! Want to be featured on HackerNoon’s Company of the Week? Request Your Tech Company Page on HackerNoon Want to be featured on HackerNoon’s Company of the Week? Request Your Tech Company Page on HackerNoon Meet Stellar Founded in 2014, Stellar helps builders integrate payment systems into any application. On their website , people can learn how to set up instant global payments, digital wallets, and help them create smart contracts. website And if that’s not enough to show how great Stellar is, why don’t we hear from them? From Stellar’s Docs: Stellar is a layer-1 open-source, decentralized, peer-to-peer blockchain network that provides a framework for developers to create applications, issue assets, write smart contracts, and connect to existing financial rails. Stellar is designed to enable creators, innovators, and developers to build projects on the network that can interoperate with each other. Stellar is a layer-1 open-source, decentralized, peer-to-peer blockchain network that provides a framework for developers to create applications, issue assets, write smart contracts, and connect to existing financial rails. Stellar is designed to enable creators, innovators, and developers to build projects on the network that can interoperate with each other. Stellar <> HackerNoon Tech Community The HackerNoon community has written about Stellar for many years. A ton of great stories have been written about how Stellar works, the history of Stellar, and how to implement it into your projects. Check out some of them below! Why Stellar could be the next big ICO platform Stellar $XLM Wiki: Coin History, Techstack, and Crypto News Stellar Blockchain is the right platform for building next-gen FinTech Products. Here’s why Why Stellar could be the next big ICO platform Why Stellar could be the next big ICO platform Stellar $XLM Wiki: Coin History, Techstack, and Crypto News Stellar $XLM Wiki: Coin History, Techstack, and Crypto News Stellar Blockchain is the right platform for building next-gen FinTech Products. Here’s why Stellar Blockchain is the right platform for building next-gen FinTech Products. Here’s why Like 4000+ other brands, you can also benefit from publishing on HackerNoon:Learn more about HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program Learn about our Technology Press Release Program. Like 4000+ other brands, you can also benefit from publishing on HackerNoon:Learn more about HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program Like 4000+ other brands, you can also benefit from publishing on HackerNoon: Learn more about HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program Learn more about HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program Learn about our Technology Press Release Program . Learn about our Learn about our Technology Press Release Program Technology Press Release Program . And that’s it for this week’s edition! We hope to see you next week! - The HackerNoon Team

Meet Stellar: HackerNoon Company of the Week

মেট স্টেলার: হ্যাকারনুন কোম্পানি অফ দ্য উইক

Lernen Sie Stellar kennen: HackerNoon-Unternehmen der Woche

Conozca a Stellar: la empresa de la semana de HackerNoon

Rencontrez Stellar : entreprise HackerNoon de la semaine

स्टेलर से मिलिए: हैकरनून कंपनी ऑफ द वीक

Stellar のご紹介: 今週の HackerNoon 企業

Stellar를 만나보세요: 금주의 HackerNoon 회사

Conheça Stellar: Empresa HackerNoon da Semana

Встречайте Stellar: компания недели HackerNoon

Stellar ile Tanışın: Haftanın HackerNoon Şirketi

Gặp gỡ Stellar: Công ty HackerNoon của tuần

认识 Stellar：HackerNoon 本周公司

This is the official HackerNoon wiki for Stellar. As part of our , this living wiki displays on If you’d like to suggest edits to our official Uniswap wiki, please submit them in the comment field below, a real human editor will read and review your suggestions for accuracy and publication. coin price pages Stellar crypto price page. Stellar is an open-source payment network that allows for the creation, trade, and sending of digital representations of currency in all its forms. Unlike physical money, the Lumen isn’t issued by central banks. This means governments don’t interfere with their activities. The Stellar Lumen is one of the best-performing and older forms of cryptocurrency. History of Stellar Stellar was founded by Jed McCaleb and is operated by the Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit organization he and collaborator Patrick Collison founded. The foundation debuted on July 31st, 2014. The initial funding for the Stellar Project came from the payment startup Stripe headed by Patrick Collison which offered $3 million. Stellar launched with 100 billion stellar. 25 Billion Stellars went to donors from the initial funding such as Google, Fast Forward and Black Rock. Stripe received 2 billion stellars as a return for the initial funding. The name of the cryptocurrency was changed from Stellar to Lumens or XLM. In 2014, Brazil’s first bitcoin exchange, Mercado Bitcoin, announced they would be using the Stellar network. Stellar had approximately 3 million users registered by January 2015. Stellar’s Biggest Claim to Fame In 2014, Stellar created the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) making it an open-source system. Under the SCP, transaction authentication is left to a select group of nodes on the blockchain, where it is hosted, instead of a whole set of nodes. This shortens the approval cycle and allows for faster and cheaper processing of transactions. The Lumen is a low-cost but legitimate form of crypto. It is a reliable and affordable cryptocurrency investment and is popular for it. Stellar stopped selling Lumens which has allowed for the value of the Lumen to rise, especially considering the Lumen is not a form of cryptocurrency that can be mined. The value of the Lumen depends on the number in circulation at any given time. Stellar has several partnerships with big companies. Stellar tries to solve the real-world problem of high transfer fees which is encouraging bigger financial institutions such as Moneygram which can afford to partner with the cryptocurrency offered by Stellar since they seem to have a solid base they can work with, even though it is not especially profitable. Criticism of Stellar Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of Stellar, was involved in a lawsuit when he tried to sell off his stake in Ripple after he left the company, knowing a lawsuit was coming for the company. This does not reflect well on the company, so the value of the coin will drop drastically if he gets involved in another scandal. Jed McCaleb was involved in a company that was hacked while he was in charge. The hack cost the company $460 million. This makes people weary of investing their money in a project he is involved in. The Stellar foundation had over 100 billion lumens originally but they removed nearly half of them from circulation in November 2019. This was controversial since this kind of market manipulation is one of the things decentralized systems like cryptocurrency are supposed to prevent. The Stellar Team Jed McCaleb is a co-founder and chief technology officer of Stellar. He founded and served as the CTO of Ripple until 2013. He co-founded the Stellar Development Foundation in 2014 to develop the Stellar open-source protocol which allowed cross-border monetary transactions. Joyce Kim is a co-founder and executive director of Stellar. She started her career as a lawyer. She co-founded Simplehoney, a mobile commerce startup, in 2011. She was Vice Chairperson at Freestyle Capital before she joined McCaleb as co-founder of Stellar. Conclusion Stellar is more of a money transfer platform than it is a crypto platform. Crypto is a means to transfer money for the company and not the essence of the company. This is the official HackerNoon wiki for Stellar. As part of our , this living wiki displays on If you’d like to suggest edits to our official Uniswap wiki, please submit them in the comment field below, a real human editor will read and review your suggestions for accuracy and publication. coin price pages Stellar crypto price page.

Stellar $XLM Wiki: Coin History, Techstack, and Crypto News

Ever since I heard of Stellar, a project to disrupt the financial world from a publication, I was intrigued. I guess it was around the time they’d raise $3 million from Stripe that I started exploring the potential of Stellar blockchain. The tech-media obsession and incessant and other blockchain projects by journalists across the world sure helped too in keeping me intrigued. blockchain comparison of Stellar with Ethereum A few months down the line, me and my team had worked upon a number of POCs and explored the possibilities with the platform. Almost 2 and a half years down the line, today, our team has successfully worked on a number of products based on the stellar blockchain. In this post, I am going to explain why Stellar is the right platform for building Fintech products. First of all, I’ll discuss the basic pointers about the Stellar blockchain. Following this, we will discuss a few product ideas that can be made with this blockchain platform. So, without any further ado, let’s begin: Basic Primer of Stellar Blockchain The motto of Stellar and the people building it is to let people send and receive money across borders quickly, reliably and for fractions of a penny. It connects banks, payment systems and the users who are associated or interact with them and aims at integrating them so that the process of moving money can be done at almost no cost. With products built upon Stellar blockchain, the mobile money apps can be made interoperable with increased efficiency and decreased costs of the smaller transactions. The Stellar blockchain has a decentralized and open database which enables it to maintain a confirmation time of 3–5 seconds. Not only this, since the Stellar blockchain is not programmed in a Turing complete language (Read: Faster than Ethereum Blockchain), the transactions-per-second rate is high too. The stellar consensus protocol, which we’ll be discussing in the article later, enables multi-signatures and smart contracts. Here’s how the Stellar blockchain works for cross-border payments: Say you are trying to send a certain amount of USD to a person you do business with, let’s call him Kevin in Europe who will be receiving it in EUR. Now, if your’s and Brad’s bank are connected to the Stellar network as anchors. Once you try sending money in USD to Brad, transaction intent is forwarded to his bank in order to check whether Brad is compliant or not. Upon green light from the European bank, the funds are deducted from your bank account and then transferred to the stellar network in form of Lumens. Once the Lumens are inside the network, the money is sent to Brad’s bank and then credited into his account. As most of you already know, the stellar blockchain is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network and an open ledger. Every detail of all the transactions is stored in the blockchain and it acts as a transparent and open ledger. Another important component of the stellar blockchain is what we call “anchors”. So, What exactly is an Anchor? In the Stellar blockchain, anchors can hold a deposit and issue credits to the participants as per the situation. Here’s what the Stellar foundation has to say about anchors: “They act as a bridge between different and the Stellar network. All money transactions in the Stellar network (except the native digital currency of lumens) occur in the form of a credit issued by anchors.” currencies Anchors are instrumental for a streamlined functioning of the processes that happen in Stellar blockchain. Trusting the anchors is very important if you want to perform any action using the stellar blockchain. Product Ideas Using Stellar Blockchain: The widespread usage of P2P payments app such as Venmo is no secret. But building one using the blockchain was a challenge yet to be tackled before Stellar came around. If you choose to build a payments app using the stellar blockchain, the transaction charges can be maintained to be minimal and faster (order of 5 seconds). P2P Payments App- technology By using Stellar blockchain as the underlying technology, you can enable low-cost and cross-border payments with very low minimum waiting time and low to minimize overhead costs. — The stellar protocol has given a totally new meaning to building decentralized exchanges as the security in network is increased as independent servers with fault tolerance systems participate in the network. Building Decentralized Exchanges The main difference between Stellar DEX and other centralized, or decentralized exchanges is that you control your own money. Your private key is in control of you and you alone. Unlike centralized exchanges, where these are stored in centralized servers, or Ethereum based exchanges, where these are stored in smart contracts, Stellar DEX gives you full power to control your money. This means no amount of hacking into the central servers or manipulation of smart contracts is going to make you lose your money. Things like this is what makes the idea to make a cryptocurrency exchange on the stellar blockchain a great idea. Read here for more on how to make a cryptocurrency exchange using stellar blockchain. — This is one of the most interesting use-cases that I’m still working on. And will be sharing details soon once our team has worked it all out. As a matter of fact, with the rising adoption and awareness of security tokens and tokenization, asset digitization has a great shot at true blockchain/crypto adoption. Products for asset digitization like based on the Stellar blockchain are already in place. Asset Digitization Slice — For those who haven’t been introduced with the notion and sheer magnitude of sharing economy, let me put it simply: It’s what the next industrial revolution is going to be about. Have a look at this . For a better understanding on how the sharing economy is shaping today, have a look at this post from Sodio’s blog: . Enabling the Sharing Economy video by a professor from Wharton Dynamics of Sharing Economy But for sharing economy to be really feasible, developments in cloud technology, IOT and AI/ML are of paramount importance. But the real challenge would still be left far from being taken care of: “How do you get people to share their resources without a robust and proven payment infrastructure?” For example, Say you build a platform where a person with mobile data while traveling lets others use it via hotspots. And since we’re the creators and believers of technology, let’s assume matching, metering, and whatnot — all will be done real smooth. But how does the person who shares his mobile data with others will get paid for? That’s where the stellar blockchain comes in as you can build payment platforms with it. What Sodio has built using Stellar Blockchain — . Won’t be discussing cashstash as of now. Hope to do it in a future post! CashStash

Stellar Blockchain is the right platform for building next-gen FinTech Products. Here’s why

By , Snr Architect at PeopleBrowsr and Andrew Maizels www.Coin.Kred The Stellar and Ethereum networks are in many ways complementary. provides simple transactional functionality that is cheap and fast, with transactions costing a small fraction of a cent and consistently taking less than ten seconds to complete. provides a complete programming language (Solidity), smart contracts, and data storage, but as a result transactions are orders of magnitude slower and more expensive. What’s more, the cost of transactions on Ethereum is variable with both complexity (code and metadata) and network congestion. Stellar Ethereum allows it to benefit from the best of both worlds — Stellar’s low cost and high speed, and Ethereum’s power and flexibility. But this requires that tokens can be moved safely from one blockchain to another without loss or duplication. Making an application dual-platform Representation Because metadata on Stellar is limited to an asset and a 32-character metadata field — and large amounts of metadata becomes infeasibly expensive on Ethereum when the tokens are of relatively small real value — the bulk of the metadata is stored in IPFS. Stellar transactions store the token ID using the metadata field, linking back to the IPFS address for the full token data. They can optionally store additional numeric metadata fields using alternate asset types. Ethereum uses an ERC721 contract that allows key metadata to be stored directly in the blockchain without needing to refer to IPFS. Coin ID and value, batch ID, sequence and count, and direct links to the IPFS metadata and the corresponding API endpoint (following the ERC721 metadata standard). The IPFS metadata is always present, so when moving from Stellar to Ethereum we can rely on it to fill in the additional fields. The core, immutable metadata is written to the ERC721 token as well so that it can be used directly by Ethereum smart contracts. For example, the nominal value of the token can be used by a smart contract managing token sales, auctions, or trades, and the batch and sequence can control uniqueness. Transfers The Ethereum and Stellar blockchains are entirely separate entities, and a token cannot truly leave either network. So the process of transferring tokens is one of careful, auditable bookkeeping. The requirements are: No token can be lost — the transfer from one network to the other should succeed fully or fail such that all changes are reverted. No token can be duplicated — if a token is transferred to another network, it is no longer available on the original network. Transactions are verifiable — any third party should be able to inspect the respective blockchains and come to the same conclusion as to the ownership of any token. The Simple Case In the primary use case, tokens are initially created in Stellar wallets that are delegated to the application. Advanced users who wish to hold token in their personal wallet (such as Metamask) or trade on exchanges such as Rarebits or Opensea, or decentralised networks such as 0x, would need to first transfer their tokens to Ethereum. The simplest way to handle this is using a conventional database as the control mechanism, and publish the transactional notations to IPFS. Simple Flow Example An annotation is made in the database and on IPFS that the specified token is to be transferred from the user’s Stellar wallet to the desired Ethereum wallet. A transaction is opened on the database and on Stellar simultaneously to move the token to a designated holding wallet. Tokens in the holding wallet are unavailable to users or to normal application transactions.The Stellar transaction carries the value of the token (in the application’s defined asset) and the token’s unique hash. When the transaction completes on Stellar, the database transaction is automatically committed, and a second annotation is made in the database and published to IPFS.The application data and IPFS are updated to show that there is a pending transaction on the token and no other operations are possible until it completes. A new annotation is added to the database and published to IPFS showing that the token is being transferred from the holding wallet on Stellar to Ethereum. A transaction is posted to the ERC721 contract to create the token on Ethereum. The resulting transaction ID is posted to the database and published to IPFS. At this point, transactions can no longer be processed in lockstep, as the processing times are both long and unpredictable. Instead, we use an Ethereum blockchain scanner to monitor the transaction ID for verification of success or failure.(In practice, we actually track all Ethereum transactions relating to the application’s ERC20 and ERC721 tokens, so no separate task needs to be run to track this particular transaction.) When the scanner sees verification of the transaction, we clear the pending status in the application database, and publish a final annotation to confirm that the token is now live on the Ethereum network. Failure Modes and Error Handling If an annotation for a pending transaction for the token already exists in the database, the transaction will fail immediately. If the transaction has failed and needs to be retried, it is necessary to wait for confirmation of the failure to be processed through the blockchain scanner and for the database to be updated. If the transfer to the holding wallet fails on Stellar, the database transaction is rolled back, and a failure annotation is made in the database and published to IPFS. (The database annotations are made in an independent transaction and are not rolled back.)In this unusual case, we can provide immediate feedback to the user via the application or API. If we suffer a local server failure during the Stellar processing window, we will be left with an annotation of the transaction, and no subsequent annotation.If there are any such orphan annotations found on recovery, we can verify their status against the Stellar blockchain, and choose to either restart or revert the transaction. If we receive a verified failure on the Ethereum transaction, we can retry the transaction automatically. It may be that the Ethereum network was temporarily congested, or that the gas allocated was too low.In either case, we will create a failure annotation and a retry annotation in the database and IPFS, and wait again on verification in the blockchain scanner. If the Ethereum transaction cannot be processed in a timely manner — if the Ethereum network is severely congested or gas prices are excessive, as was seen for several days in August 2018 — we can instead choose to completely unwind the transaction and return the token to the user’s Stellar wallet.However, this must wait for confirmation of failure on the Ethereum transaction, which in severely congested conditions may itself take hours. While the transaction is still under way on Ethereum it is not possible to cancel it; it can be overridden with a higher gas fee, but that doesn’t help if the gas fee is excessive due to network congestion. More Complex Cases In this application it is envisaged that a token once transferred to Ethereum for trading will remain on the Ethereum network. However, it is equally possible to transfer the token back to the Stellar network via a reverse process. The token is transferred to a smart contract designating the target Stellar wallet, and the blockchain scanner initiates a transaction on the Stellar network to return the previously held token from the holding wallet to the destination user wallet. This can fail in the following cases: If the transfer to the smart contract fails, it is handled by Ethereum, with no need for the gateway to intercede. This applies both to Ethereum network failures, and transfers that are rejected by the smart contract, for example, invalid ERC721 tokens. If the destination wallet does not exist on Stellar, it is possible to tell the smart contract to return the original token. If tokens are transferred in both directions, a token might already exist on the Ethereum network when a transfer is initiated from Stellar. In this case, the token will already be held in a smart contract. Rather than using the ERC721 contract to generate the token — which would fail due to uniqueness constraints on the tokens — we instead instruct the smart contract to release the token to the designated Ethereum wallet. Andrew’s work on the Stellar to Ethereum Gateway is in production on the and applications built on the platform, including . Kred’s NFT Platform ( NFT.Kred ) Kred Coins ( Coin.Kred ) Several use case applications that feature Andrew’s Stellar to Ethereum Gateway on February 20 at the PlayStation Theater, Times Square, New York. will be presented at the NFT.NYC Non-Fungible Tokens event Developer tickets are available on with the code NFT.NYC NFTDEV

Implementing a Stellar to Ethereum Gateway

Stellar is a platform that is geared towards banking and cross-border financial transactions. It intends to address issues with remittances, mobile payments, and micropayment. A big objective of the Stellar network is to provide affordable financial services at a lightning pace. blockchain Stellar Consensus Protocol The Stellar was launched in 2014 as a fork of the Ripple protocol. Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Ripple and founder of Mt. Gox, along with lawyer Joyce Kim. However, since Stellar architecture has been restructured to solve various problems it is now significantly different from Ripple. In the beginning, the cryptocurrency on the network was called “Stellar” as well. But it has since been changed from stellars to lumens (XLM) to avoid any possible confusion with the Stellar network. network Stellar solves a consensus protocol problem that plagues other blockchains or digital ledger technologies. Blockchain uses to maintain the reliability of records and transactions. Most blockchains use what is known as Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). A blockchain network that uses PBFT needs 66 percent of the validators to agree on transactions to attain quorum or consensus. In order to maintain the validity of the network, the number of malicious nodes needs to stay below 33 percent. Systems like Hyperledger and Ripple use PBFT. Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) Researchers found out that the PBFT of the Ripple protocol was not fault tolerant enough. Also, the selection of validators makes PBFT systems become centralized. So PBFT was replaced with Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA). In an FBA system, there is no need for predefined validators. Nodes make the decisions individually about who to trust. It decentralizes the system. Instead of the whole quorum or a preset number of nodes, FBA systems use “quorum slice” or a subset of the quorum. In an FBA system, nodes broadcast to each other on which quorum slices they trust. Nodes individually determine which quorums to trust and build their own quorum based on the information they have at hand. The ideal situation is to have quorum intersections or quorum overlaps. This ensures there is consensus throughout the network. If there are no intersections, then there will be disjoint quorums which can lead to the recording of contradictory transactions. It is the biggest risk of using the Stellar network. uses FBA to have a more decentralized system. The network is more open to new nodes and FBA also makes the network more reliable in case of failure. Stellar Consensus Protocol Achievements of Stellar Network Stellar is gaining ground over Ethereum because it is cheaper and faster and asset exchange is a built-in feature of the Stellar protocol. While users normally have to use third-party exchanges in order to deal with Ethereum transactions, this ease of use has made Stellar popular with a lot of projects. IBM is one of the biggest names that has multiple projects currently using the Stellar blockchain. It has launched the Stellar-based payment system called “Blockchain World Wire.” IBM has also streamlined the previously complex and cumbersome process of carbon credit trading with Stellar based system set up to offset environmental damage by supporting a patch of Indonesian rainforest. The Future Roadmap Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has acquired Chain, a blockchain firm, in September 2018. The firm is backed by Visa, Nasdaq, and Citi Ventures. Also, Stellar has recently implemented the Stellar Decentralized Exchange (SDEX) and work is in progress on the Stellar Lighting Network. Even though Stellar might not yet have the big brand recognition of Ethereum, but the advantages described above and the support of some major industry players ensure it is becoming more and more prominent in the blockchain ecosystem.

A Simple Guide to Understanding the Stellar Blockchain Network

Let’s go back in time…it’s January 2018 — after a very crypto-enthusiastic finish of 2017 we storm into the new year with high hopes. No matter how many moons some people flew to, we were all brought back to Earth — and the landing was anything but gentle. Now almost 8 months later we are still deep into bear market. The coin craze has stopped and community views have shifted. We are now more cautious — people no longer believe in empty promises. What they want to see are working products with real-life use cases. While painful, this bear market could be the start of a new era in cryptocurrencies. Instead of speculative toys, we will finally have technologies and solutions that allow companies to reinvent core ways of doing business. Payments are one of the business pillars — and Stellar could be the thing pushing them forward into the future. But what exactly is Stellar? Stellar is an open-source decentralized protocol for digital currency to Fiat transfers that allows transactions between ANY currencies. It was launched by the founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple — Jed McCaleb. Stellar was created in collaboration with Stripe — unicorn fintech startup — who that Stellar $3 million in seed funding. Imagine that you have USD that you wish to exchange for EUR. You could do it at the traditional currency exchange point and lose (a lot of) money and time during the process. You could also use Stellar and its decentralized exchange which will find the cheapest possible exchange rates for your currency pair automatically. https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/stellar-basics/#how-it-works How is that magic achieved though? Stellar is basically a network of decentralized servers scattered across the world. These servers record every single transaction that occurs on the Stellar network. Each and every one of them holds a complete copy of all the transactions that happened. All these data forms distributed ledger — the state of the Stellar network at a given time and the servers act as validators. Any entity can launch their own Stellar server and the more servers there are, the more independent the network is. This allows Stellar (and many other projects) to avoid the single point of failure flaw. When one server fails, the continues to work as usual — this is not the case for traditional banking systems, as some of their parts are necessary for entire systems to work — a failure of such part means outage. blockchain network When it comes to transactions, there are no miners wasting years worth of energy like it happens for Bitcoin — validation is achieved in a different way. What Stellar came up with is called Stellar Consensus Protocol. The Consensus https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/stellar-basics/explainers/#Consensus All the validators on the Stellar Network periodically agree on a new ledger of transactions — this is what we call consensus. Every validator creates their own list of validators that they trust — also known as their quorum slice. Together these slices form a network-wide quorum. This helps Stellar stay decentralized — there is no central entity that is forming the trusted validators list. After the network-wide quorum agrees on a certain version of the ledger the consensus is reached. Because there is no need to solve complex cryptographic puzzles and the transactions are validated in a voting process, Stellar is able to achieve transaction time of about 3 to 5 seconds. Read more about the consensus . here Distributed Exchange https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/stellar-basics/explainers/#DistributedExchange Thanks to the distributed exchange Stellar is able to fulfill its function as a universal payment system. Ledger stores the buy or sell orders that users make — such offer is public commitment to exchange one type of asset for another. The rate at which the assets will be exchanged is predetermined and every currency pair forms its own order book. But what if I want to exchange BTC for Venezuelan bolívars and the order book is empty?! Stellar supports multi-currency transactions. The network will automatically find the best exchange rate for given transaction. This could be achieved by a chain of transactions between different currency pairs. If there are no explicit relationship between offers to buy and sell, Stellar tries to find offers from the network that will lead a chain of conversions from EUR to USD. For example, EUR to AUD, AUD to BTC, BTC to ETH, ETH to USD. Stellar anchors https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/stellar-basics/explainers/#Anchors Stellar allows its users to use so many trading pairs thanks to trusted entities that are called anchors. Anchors act like connections between different currencies and the Stellar network. Users make deposits to the anchors that in return issue the same amount in form of credit. This credit is then assigned to the user account in the Stellar network. Users can give the issued credit back to the anchor to trigger withdrawal — almost all the transactions between users in the Stellar network are credit exchanges. Stellar Lumens Apart from all the different currencies, Stellar Network has one native cryptocurrency called Lumens (XLM). Lumens are an essential part of the Stellar Network — they act as an anti-spam tool. Each transaction requires a very small fee and every account on the Stellar Network must meet the minimal XLM balance criteria to remain active. This makes it harder to perform DoS attacks on the network. Additionally, should two currencies have no direct link between themselves Lumens might step in as a bridge between desired assets, effectively making the transaction possible. XLM price chart That sounds good… too good to be true? An almost free to use payment network sure does sound appealing, but Stellar is not flawless. Because there are no block mining rewards, there are fewer network validators compared to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. The lack of incentives to become a validator could destabilize the network. https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/stellar-basics/explainers/ Another con is that Stellar Network requires anchors to fulfill its core functionality and there are many obstacles that an institution willing to become an anchor has to overcome. First and foremost the users need to trust the anchor with their own money. Without trust, no one will make deposits for credit and without credit, there is no network. An Anchor basically becomes a financial entity — that automatically involves a lot of responsibility as well as regulation and law-related work — this means that anchors will most likely be licensed money services providers and it might be hard to convince such institution to use Stellar. As of now, scalability is also a major concern. While still much faster than Bitcoin, Stellar is not quite there compared to traditional payment methods like Visa when it comes to the number of transactions per second. Suiting Stellar to your business Established companies are already building services on the Stellar Network. I’m sure some of you have heard about Deloitte? They are one of them. Stellar network is an open source project — all the software you might need to integrate it with your business is licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0 and there are no restrictions on any commercial use of the Stellar network. What you need, however, is a development team that will create and integrate your solution with the Stellar network — this process shouldn’t take more than 200 hours of development (according to Stellar.org). To support this process an official REST API — Horizon has been released, along with JavaScript, Java and Go SDKs that allow you to connect to the Horizon. The community also maintains SDKs in . many more languages https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/get-started/ Most applications will interact with Stellar using the Horizon API — it provides easy and accessible ways to submit transactions, check accounts and perform other frequent tasks. It can be easily used with tools like cURL or web browsers. Stellar Core is the backbone of the network — this is the place that performs validation. Together with other instances of Core, it agrees on the status of transactions on the network. Stellar provides detailed documentation that will help you with your first steps in development — start with the and work your way from here. beginner’s guide Is it even worth it? Stellar is not seeing mass adoption yet — but that is true for every blockchain and cryptocurrency connected project out there. As of now, it provides cheap and easy to integrate payment solutions — with the cheap part being important especially for smaller startups. Traditional fees may exceed 3% of transaction value. With Stellar a $0.01 fee will satisfy about 600 000 transactions. Ability to accept payments with technically any currency is crucial as it single-handedly opens our services to new markets — something that traditional payment providers cannot guarantee. Stellar opens the magnitude of new possibilities as useful for entrepreneurs as for users. However what it needs is more adoption so ask yourself one question — could this kind of payment system be beneficial for the growth of your venture? While working on this article I collaborated with the team at ! upnext.io

Building financial systems with Stellar — finally creating applications of real economic activity.

Background image by Nathan Anderson Blockchain, whether you like it or not, is changing the landscape of technology every day, and it doesn’t look like it is going to stop anytime soon. And the more we rely on this distributed network architecture, we are actually relying on its ability to conduct trades or transaction in the most transparent and trustless way possible. To achieve this, the blockchain technologies of today empower us with a very powerful tool — . Smart Contracts Smart contracts come in various flavors depending on what blockchain you choose, the most famous being the Ethereum smart contracts on Solidity at the moment, primarily because of its versatility (as it is Turing Complete). But there are other blockchain technologies out there which let you establish just as much… just in a different way. One such technology is , and it is what we chose as the fundamental tool set of our product — , and also to run its . Stellar TillBilly ICO There are multiple reasons why we chose Stellar, you can find out more in our , but one major reason was its simplified smart contract, something that we had unanimously agreed on right from the very beginning is a must for running an ICO. whitepaper was what (our advisor) said when I was discussing Stellar smart contracts with him. “Stellar smart contracts are still black magic for most” Johan Stén So hopefully this article will guide and possibly help others who wish to utilize SSC (Stellar Smart Contracts) and SDEX (Stellar Distributed Exchange) for running their ICOs. Let’s jump in! As the name suggests, this model deals with creating an intermediate account for every user who wishes to contribute towards the ICO. The main highlight here is that there exists an account between the contributor and company which is partially controlled by both parties through Stellar multi-signature feature. To make things simpler, let’s set up a few acronyms: Intermediary Account Contributing User COmpany conducting the ICO Stellar Distributed Exchange Stellar Smart Contract (or a fully formed unsubmitted transaction) Genesis Account (token issuer) ICO funds Holding Account Trusted Party IM: CU: CO: SDEX: SSC: GA: HA: TP: Key highlights: is the account where will transfer funds to IM CU The control of the secret key for resides fully with the and responsibility of funding (and activating) this account on Stellar remains in the hands of the IM CU CO is added as a signer on for partial control CO IM participates on (creates offer on) to buy the tokens and hold it for the duration of ICO IM SDEX On ICO success, no longer remains as a signer. This is handled via an and full control of goes to CO SSC IM CU On ICO failure, is still removed as a signer but the refund mechanism is handled by another on CO SSC HA Issuing account (genesis account) setup: One thing to note here — will need to have some control over the operations on itself, namely operations. This is because we want control over who can establish a trustline with our token and allowing trust is a low threshold operation. GA low threshold sends a set number of tokens to GA HA sets up its own sets of (explained later) HA SSCs performs the following operations: GA - Add as a signer with weight 1- Set its own weight to 1- Set authorization required flag- Set low threshold to 1- Set medium and high threshold to 2 TP This will allow to allow trustlines but will not allow it to make any more payment (token generation) transactions. GA Note: Since we have to allow trustlines throughout the duration of ICO, we cannot have a pre signed time locked transaction for clearing the authorization required flag after the ICO. After the ICO is concluded, the following transaction will be submitted (signed by both and ): GA TP - Clear authorization required flag- Reset thresholds- Remove as a signer- Set own weight to zero TP Setting own weight to zero will effectively render the account as worthless and no more tokens can be generated. User’s, however, can establish trustlines freely to trade these tokens. SSCs on ICO success or failure (key takeaways): will implement a multi signature with a on Stellar (could be a person, an organization etc.). HA TP holds all the tokens that are to be sold during the ICO. HA creates offer on to sell tokens for XLM HA SDEX A pre signed transaction with a set date determines the success or failure of ICO Success transaction will be time locked and with following operations (Seq number: M) - Send SOFT_CAP_AMOUNT to - Remove as a signer- Reset thresholds- Clear the offer on CO TP SDEX (If the ICO is not successful in raising the soft cap, this transaction will fail) Failure transaction, time locked (Seq number: M + 1) - Create an offer on to buy back tokens for XLM SDEX The challenge here is that we have to release all XLMs from in this case. Something that cannot be pre-written. So we’ll rely on again to create a transaction in this case or update the offer on with the right amount of XLMs. HA TP SDEX We will assume that all other prerequisites are met including website account creation, email verification, KYC and AML checks etc. User comes on to the dashboard and sees a button to create a wallet ( ). 1. IM Upon clicking, an offline Stellar keypair (only for the first time) is generated for the user. The secret is saved in the browser temporarily for the upcoming set of transactions. 2. User is prompted to save this keypair securely (An option can be given where we generate a keystore file locked with a password and save it on the server). 3. The user is then prompted to enter the secret key again in order to proceed with the next step. This is to ensure that user has saved the private key. 4. In the background (via xhr), we fund with 3 XLM thereby activating it (calculations later). The server responds with a success status along with ’s public key. 5. IM CO Upon successful activation, we create a transaction with following operations on (this transaction envelope (XDR) is sent to server instead of Stellar) 6. IM - Request trustline for token- Add as a signer with weight 1- Set all thresholds to 2- Set own weight to 1 CO Server submits this transaction on Stellar and then approves the trustline from the token issuing account. Wallet is now set up to receive funds (XLM) from external sources and ready to buy tokens from . 7. SDEX User is now presented a button to buy tokens. On clicking, we ask user to deposit XLM in from anywhere they want. It could be their own Stellar wallet or an exchange as well. 8. IM Browser shows a waiting status while it waits for an incoming transaction. We check this by using Server-Sent Events (streaming) mode. 9. Upon receiving funds, we create the following transactions (partially signing it using the secret key saved in the browser): 10. Transaction #1: (N) - Send 3 XLM to - Create an offer on to buy tokens for all but 3 XLM in account CO (recovering the account activation funds — one time only) SDEX Transaction #2: (N + 1) Time locked for the duration of ICO - Remove as a signer from this account- Reset thresholds CO Both transactions are sent to the server. Transaction #1 is signed by and submitted directly to Stellar network. Transaction #2 is signed and its hash and transaction envelope are saved on server. Server also returns these to the user if they want to verify and save it with them. 11. CO Every time the user wants to transfer funds, steps 8 to 11 are repeated. 12. The server will post this transaction #2 in step 10 upon completion of the ICO regardless the ICO succeeds or not. In case of when ICO is successful, the tokens are already in user’s account with full control of the account as well. The dashboard can provide quick and easy options to transfer these funds to a different account or merge it with another account etc. In case of when it fails, we are locked by a different set of which keeps both us and our users protected. We will again provide simple options on the dashboard to claim the funds back. SSCs Calculating minimum account balance for IM: Minimum balance required: 0.5 x (2 + # of entries) Every for ICO should have: IM 1 Trustline with the issuer’s token 1 Signer ( ) CO 1 Data entry (for handling bonus tokens, if required) Putting these values in the equation: 0.5 x (2 + 3) = 2.5 XLM Potential operations that will go through: IM Establish a trustline Set options (add signer, set thresholds, set own weight) Create offers on SDEX Transfer funds to user’s main account after ICO success Merge account with user’s main account Since the cost of these operations is not too high, having 0.5 XLM for fees is safe enough. So in total, each should have a minimum of 3 XLM deposited by the initially which can later be recovered. The real world (fiat) value can change depending on what is the cost of XLM at that point. IM CO That wraps it up! Now there can be more ways through which this model could be enhanced. For example: This was again suggested by Johan, in steps 2 through 4 in , you could use BIP-39 Mnemonic Code to ensure that contributing users indeed remember their secret keys. ICO sale process Another for when a user didn’t contribute at all and needs to recover the 3 XLMs transferred initially to activate the . SSC CO IM But this is something I’d leave up to you guys! Originally published by Aditya Moghe , engineering director at TillBilly — a forward-looking startup working on an innovative solution to bring blockchain based point of sale payments solution to the mainstream retail.

Creating smart contracts for your ICO on Stellar

San Francisco, CAAugust 6th, 2018 I most recently came across the above Reddit post inquiring about EOS Security Token offerings. When prominent companies such as (SCI) and have decided to conduct ERC-20 security token offerings, it begs us to ask the question — why have other ecosystems neglected to market toward security token offerings to STO on their public blockchains? Other public blockchains that are now also bullish on the security token space include Stellar, which Sharespost GLASS partnered with last week — more on that . Science Blockchain SPIN (PIN) here My assumption is that the more conservative crowd that security token offerings would market to will likely prefer the most popular ERC-20 standard when first “dipping their toes” in and deciding on their first couple of investments to make. A first-time security token buyer would probably not have the risk appetite to test newer blockchains that claim to be faster and cheaper while lacking ERC-20’s track record and existing community. After all, nobody gets fired for choosing IBM. What are your thoughts? Have you heard of any up-and-coming STO’s planning on raising money through the TRC-20 (TRON) or QRC-20 (QTUM) or XLM standards? Why did they choose to go with these public blockchains? Which public blockchains have the potential to become the de facto standards for Security Token Offerings? Let me know in the comments below. ___ Disclaimer: These opinions are solely my own and do not represent the opinions of Sharespost or any companies that I may advise or invest in. Please follow me on , , and if you’d like to connect. Twitter Medium LinkedIn Thank you kind reader for taking the time to read through my blog! If we haven’t met yet, it’s an honor to make your acquaintance. My name is John Wu and I am currently CEO of Sharespost’s Digital Assets Group. My primary aim is to bridge the gap between professional “institution-grade” asset management and cryptocurrency/blockchain investing. As a tech investor and entrepreneur, I have always strived to identify disruptive trends before they are well-discovered and well-understood. In the last three years, I have focused on digital assets and blockchain technology. I have invested in cryptocurrencies, and tokens — as well as VC equity of startups building the financial system of the future using blockchain and distributed ledger. I started my investing career at Tiger Management. Later, at Kingdon Capital, I invested in companies across Technology, Media, Telecom, FinTech, and Services. I founded Sureview Capital in 2010 with a strategic investment from Blackstone and raised approximately $400M in AUM. If you’d like to connect, please drop me a line on LinkedIn . here

Security Tokens — a Win for Ethereum and Stellar?

Create your first escrow smart contract on the Stellar network. Before reading this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of how Stellar works and how to create a simple account on the test network. Take a look at my in this series to get you updated. previous article This article will explain to you how to develop an escrow smart contract using Stellar Lumens. I will as well highlight some extra features like retrieving a balance and a clean history log. Extra note: This article is part of the Blockchaingers series . Together with TheLedger, we have won the ‘Digital Nations Infrastructure’ track at the largest blockchain hackathon. You can find out more about our idea here . Escrow smart contracts on the Stellar testnet are part of this prototype. Use Case Description We have two identities: a house and a contractor. The house can pay a contractor for delivering house related services like a check-up of your central heating. Once the house and contractor agree to deliver a service, the house will deposit the agreed amount (in XLM) into the escrow smart contract. Once the job is done, both the house and contractor have to sign to release the funds. Preparation First, we need a new, empty account on the testnet. Let’s create one. const newKey = Stellar.Keypair.random(); const transaction = new Stellar.TransactionBuilder(ownerAccount).addOperation(Stellar.Operation.createAccount({destination: escrowPubKey,startingBalance: '2.5000000'})).build(); transaction.sign(ownerKeypair); return StellarConfig.server.submitTransaction(transaction); We still have to define an owner account who is responsible for creating the escrow but is not able to perform any actions with it. We use a config file for retrieving our server, this piece of code is the same as: which creates a new connection with the Stellar testnet. new Stellar.Server('https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org'); Probably, you wonder why I’m sending 2.5 XLM to the escrow? Stellar reequires that each account has a starting balance of 1 XLM. In addition, we are adding two more signers besides the random escrow signer. For each signer you add to the contract, you have to top up the starting balance with 0.5 XLM. So, … 3 x 0.5 (signers) + 1 (base balance) = 2.5 Additional info can be found in the Stellar . documentation Building Stellar Escrow Transaction Let’s retrieve the escrow account, const escrowAccount = StellarConfig.server.loadAccount(pubKey); and build the escrow transaction. let transaction = new Stellar.TransactionBuilder(escrowAccount).addOperation(Stellar.Operation.setOptions({signer: {ed25519PublicKey: houseKeypair.publicKey(),weight: 1}})).addOperation(Stellar.Operation.setOptions({masterWeight: 0,lowThreshold: 2,medThreshold: 2,highThreshold: 2,signer: {ed25519PublicKey: contractorKeypair.publicKey(),weight: 1}})).build(); As you can see, we’ve added two signers to the escrow contract. We give both signers equal voting power (1) and set the threshold to two. Because we are not giving the escrow account itself an explicit weight, this is set to zero. This means both the house and contractor have to sign to release the funds, not the escrow owner. You can see an example of an escrow smart contract transaction creation . here Stellar Escrow Contract At last, we need to sign (with the random keypair) and send the transaction to the network. transaction.sign(newKey);await StellarConfig.server.submitTransaction(transaction); Ideally, the house sends the agreed amount to the escrow smart contract. The code for sending the top up transaction looks like this. memo = Stellar.Memo.text('Pay: House to Contractor');return new Stellar.TransactionBuilder(<source-account>, { memo }).addOperation(Stellar.Operation.payment({<destination-pub-key>,asset: Stellar.Asset.native(),<amount> })).build(); Release Funds Releasing the funds is actually very simple. You create a new transfer transaction from the escrow account to the contractor. The only difference here is that both the house and contractor have to sign with their keypair. transaction.sign(houseKeyPair);transaction.sign(contractorKeyPair); Additional Operations Retrieve History For Account This will give you a list of all payments a certain account has executed. We remove the first result (with ) from the array as that’s the account creation transaction (a 0 XLM payment to itself). shift() async retrievePayments(pubKey:string) {let account = await this.loadAccountAsync(pubKey);let payments = await axios.get(`${StellarConfig.baseUrl}/accounts/${account.accountId()}/payments`); let paymentRecords = payments.data._embedded.records;paymentRecords.shift(); return paymentRecords.map(record => {return {id: record.transaction_hash,from: record.from,to: record.to,amount: record.amount};});} You can use the HTTP API endpoint to retrieve this in your web browser as well. You’ll get something like: /accounts/<account-ID>/payments One payment object (history) for an account. Get Account Balance To retrieve the XLM balance of an account, you just have to load (retrieve) the account based on its public key. As an account can have multiple balances (native XLM and other coins deployed on the Stellar network), we will only look for the native balance. async getBalance(pubKey) {const account = await StellarConfig.server.loadAccount(pubKey);let balance; account.balances.forEach((balanceObject) => {if (balanceObject.asset_type === 'native') {balance = balanceObject.balance;}}); return balance; } Source: https://www.in3dc.com What to read next Exploring Stellar Lumens | Introduction Development Tutorial Builders of the Decentralized Web: 10 Of The Most Innovative Technologies The tech-stack to win the worlds biggest blockchain hackathon of 2018!

Stellar Escrow Smart Contract Development

While Ethereum has been the platform of choice for writing dApps, has really low transaction fees and is much faster than other blockchains (including Ethereum). Stellar arguably So I began to wonder what it would look like to actually build a decentralized version of a forum like HackerNews or Reddit using the Stellar . Here’s the big picture of how I envisioned it to work: blockchain Let’s see how we would go about implementing that. First, we need to on the Stellar testnet. What’s a testnet? In the simplest terms, it’s a blockchain intended for testing where you don’t incur any real fees. In this case, we’ll load up our test account with 10k fake lumens for testing. create an account Next, we will build a small JavsScript client which will allow the user to submit their post on the app. We could directly take this post and have the user send it to our app’s account by putting it in the transaction’s memo field. Although it turns out Stellar’s transaction only allows limited memo formats — Text (UTF-8 string of up to 28 bytes), ID (Unsigned 64-bit integer) or Hash (32-byte hash in hex format). So storing a large amount of text or JSON is out of the question. Send it to IPFS That’s where IPFS comes in — a P2P protocol and network designed to store and share content in a distributed file system across all devices (think of it as a love child of git and BitTorrent). We would take that data and store it in a JSON object in the IPFS. import ipfsAPI from 'ipfs-api'

// I'm just using an IPFS gateway here for testing but in a real-world setting, we would run our own IPFS node so we can persist dataconst ipfs = ipfsAPI({ host: 'ipfs.infura.io', port: 5001, protocol: 'https' });const post = JSON.stringify({title: "'So exited!!!', content: 'This is my first post on the blockchain!', username: 'h4ck3r'})"const buffer = Buffer.from(post);

ipfs.files.add(buffer, { pin: false }, (err, ipfsHash) => {  console.log(ipfsHash[0].path) // => QmV3C3HFE8824KWYTMq5fbZyF93GTMz5W7h3uBG1oVZCv8}); Now we have a hash small enough to send in the memo field. Although looks like there might be another issue. IPFS represents the hash of files and objects using a with Base58 encoding. The prefix corresponds to the algorithm (SHA-256) and length (32 bytes) used by IPFS. Multihash multiformat Qm So it looks like we are not going to be able to add this in our transaction’s Text field which only allows strings of up to 28 bytes nor are we able to use the Hash field which only allows 32-byte hash. So we’ll have to write a function that converts this IPFS hash back to 32 byte hash in hex format: import bs58 from 'bs58'

this.getBytes32FromIpfsHash = (ipfsListing) => {  // Decode the base58 string and then slice the first two bytes  // which represent the function code and it's length, in this case:  // function:0x12=sha2, size:0x20=256 bits  return bs58.decode(ipfsListing).slice(2).toString('hex')} Add it on the Blockchain Now that we have the right hash to store in the memo field, we’ll have to figure out how to actually send this transaction. One option is to prompt the user to make use of which is a Chrome extension wallet for Stellar (kind of like MetaMask for Stellar Lumens). Once they have MetaPay installed, we can just setup a URL like this: MetaPay <a ref='savePost' data-meta-pay    href="https://stellar.meta.re/transaction?to=[address]&amount=1&memo=[txMemo]" target="_blank" >Save Post</a> Now if we put it all together, the submit post logic would look something like this: import StellarSdk from 'stellar-sdk'

// Add the post data to IPFSthis.submitPost = (post) => {  const buffer = Buffer.from(post);  ipfs.files.add(buffer, (err, ipfsHash) => {    this.txMemo = this.getBytes32FromIpfsHash(ipfsHash[0].path)    this.refs['savePost'].click() // This will open the MetaPay popup    this.confirmPayment(this.txMemo) // Listen to see if the transaction went through  });}

// Check to see if the transaction went throughthis.confirmPayment = (ipfsHash) => {  const server = new StellarSdk.Server('https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org');

  server.transactions().forAccount('OUR_ACCOUNT_ID').cursor('now').stream({    onmessage: (transaction) => {      if(transaction.memo == ipfsHash) {        // Yes, it made it on the blockchain!        transaction.operations().then((ops) => {          var payment = ops._embedded.records[0];          if(parseInt(parseFloat(payment.amount)) < 1) {             console.error('Payment insufficient. Post not saved!');          } else {             this.pinIpfsListing(ipfsHash);           }        }).catch((error) => {          error.target.close(); // Close stream          console.error('Payment Error: ', error);          alert('Error confirming payment. Try again later');        });      }    },    onerror: (error) => {      error.target.close(); // Close stream      console.error('Streaming Error: ', error);    }  });} That will open the MetaPay popup with all the prefilled fields, we will wait and see if the user goes through with that transaction, if they do, we move to the next step. Persist it on IPFS // If successful, pin our post on the IPFS nodethis.pinIpfsListing = (ipfsHash) => {  ipfs.pin.add(ipfsHash)} Notice when we added our data to IPFS, we didn’t pin it. Without pinning the post, our data will not be stored permanently on the IPFS node and will eventually be garbage collected. So in a way that small transaction fee helps us pay for pinning the data / the cost of running an IPFS node and make sure the data is available for all users. Read from the Blockchain & find it on IPFS Now when other users visit the app, we will pull all the transactions posted to this app’s account, grab the memo field, encode it back to Base58 and pull the data from IPFS: import StellarSdk from 'stellar-sdk'import ipfsAPI from 'ipfs-api'

this.getIpfsHashFromBytes32 = (bytes32Hex) => {  // Add our default ipfs values for first 2 bytes:  // function:0x12=sha2, size:0x20=256 bits  const hashHex = "1220" + bytes32Hex  const hashBytes = Buffer.from(hashHex, 'hex');  const hashStr = bs58.encode(hashBytes)  return hashStr}

const server = new StellarSdk.Server('https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org');const ipfs = ipfsAPI({ host: 'ipfs.infura.io', port: 5001, protocol: 'https' });let posts = [];

server.transactions()  .forAccount('OUR_ACCOUNT_ID')  .order('desc')  .call()  .then((page) => {    page.records.forEach(record => {      if (record.memo) {        const ipfsListing = this.getIpfsHashFromBytes32(record.memo)        ipfs.files.get(ipfsListing, function (err, files) {          files.forEach((file) => {            const post = file.content.toString('utf8')            posts.push(post) // Show this to the user          })        })      }    });}); Decentralization This architecture makes sure our data is decentralized but what about the app itself? If the app goes down, users could write another client that can read from that account’s blockchain and pull the corresponding data from IPFS. Although we could go one step further and actually store the client code on the blockchain as well by utilizing the account operation. manageData Something like this could be part of the build / deploy chain for the app, so everytime a new version is released, it’s also added to the blockchain: import fs from 'fs'

this.publishClient = () {  const code = fs.readFileSync('my_project/client.js');

  ipfs.files.add(buffer, (err, ipfsHash) => {    const server = new StellarSdk.Server('https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org');

    server.loadAccount('OUR_ACCOUNT_ID').then((base) => {        const tx = new StellarSdk.TransactionBuilder(base);        const data = {name: 'v1.0.0', value: ipfsHash[0].path};        tx.addOperation(StellarSdk.Operation.manageData(data));        var builtTx = tx.build();        builtTx.sign(StellarSdk.Keypair.fromSecret('OUR_ACCOUNT_SECRET'));        return server.submitTransaction(builtTx);    });  });} Although something to keep in mind, each DataEntry increases the minimum balance needed to be held by the account. So we might want to only maintain the last version or the last couple of versions of the client codebase on the account. But that should suffice to make our demo app more or less decentralized. Conclusion This was an interesting thought experiment but this demo app still does not have a way to manage comments, upvotes, etc since we are somewhat limited by what the Stellar platform is capable of. To build something more advanced we’d need to build it on a true dApp platform like Ethereum or NEO that have all the necessary tooling to make that happen. But with the recent controversy of Facebook data and user privacy, it’s definitely time to think about how to build social apps that are decentralized. There’s a lot of interesting work done in this space with projects like , , and others which will be interesting to follow in the coming years. Datawallet Blockstack Akasha

Building an app with Stellar and IPFS

A little over a month ago, I wrote . part 1 of this multi-part series, detailing my journey into the world of Stellar Smart Contracts (SSC’s) Since then, I have received some wonderful , compliments, doubts, concerns, etc. feedback Many of these concerns were valid and today, with a completely free schedule, a warm cup of coffee, and a fully-charged computer, I sat down and looked to build off of the basics I described in pt. 1. Concepts I will first define a few basic concepts so that we are all on the same page. If you are already familiar with the basic building blocks of SSC’s feel free to skip this section. Sequence Number: Every account has a that is used to define the ordering of transactions within the Stellar for this account. Each time an account constructs a transaction, it gives that transaction a sequence number. This number must be strictly increasing — if account A has a sequence number of 1, the ONLY valid transaction for Account A is a transaction with sequence number 2. sequence number Network Operation: There are 11 (soon to be 12) defined in the Stellar Network. An operation is defined as: While the most common operations are and there are many other useful operations such as which allows you to change various settings for your account. operations an individual command that mutates the ledger. payment create account set options Threshold: Every operation has an associated — low, medium, high. This defines the signature weight required to perform an operation. threshold Signer: In Stellar, every account has a list of signers and each signer has an associated weight. For an operation to be valid, the weight of all signers added to a transaction must be greater than or equal to the threshold weight. For example, if a threshold is set to 2 and each signer on an account has a weight of 1, we need at least 2 of these signatures for this transaction to be valid. Signers can be added and removed with ease, allowing for the trivial creation of n-of-m . multi-signature accounts There are three different types of signers that can be added to an account — account id (public key), , and . In this article, we will ignore Hash(X) pre-authorized transactions Hash(X) Adding a New Tool to Our Toolbox Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. — Steve Jobs So yeah in the spirit of Steve Jobs and innovation, let’s venture into the weeds and begin to use some of Stellar’s lesser known features. Pre-authorized Transactions: A pre-authorized transaction is exactly what it sounds like — it is a transaction that has been constructed and signed, allowing the holder of that transaction to publish it to the network whenever he/she feels (however, don’t forget that the sequence number must still be valid). Cool? No? Well it gets better! This pre-authorized transaction can be added as a signer to an account. If the correct weight is given to this signature, this allows you to broadcast a transaction without any other signatures. Here is an example: Account A balance: 9 sequence #: 3 low threshold: 1 med threshold: 1 high threshold: 1 TX A: Sequence #5 Pay B 5 XLM(NO SIGNATURE NEEDED) HASH of TX A 1 TX B: Sequence #4 Set Options: Signer: Signer_weight: Now: Account A submits transaction B Account A, or anyone with transaction A, can submit transaction A without needing an additional signature : Once transaction B has been submitted, it will be removed as a signer from Account A. Note Still not cool yet? No worries, the usefulness of this tool will be obvious soon :) Improving Upon My Previous Example Let’s apply this knowledge to the example from . As a quick reminder, here is an overview of the I am looking to solve: last time problem Consider the user A who seeks to pay B,C,D for a service. If the service succeeds, B,C, and D are paid. If the service fails, only B and C are paid. B is a trusted party, capable of determining whether the service succeeds or fails. And here is the solution from last time: balance:    9 XLMsequence #: 3 Account A A constructs two transactions: **_TX A:_**Sequence #4 Pay B 3 XLMpay C 3 XLMPay D 3 XLM **_TX B:_**Sequence #4Pay B 3 XLMpay C 3 XLM A signs both these transactions and gives them to B. Once the service is finished, B submits or depending on the success of the service. TX A TX B However, note one of the major flaws I did not address in the previous example (thanks to Alexander for the comment): Alice [A in the example above] could just issue another transaction that increases the sequence number Unfortunately, yes she could. So how can we these funds and prevent Alice from spending the money she has to pay B, C, and/or D? lock set aside To do this, we will use our new tool: . pre-authorized transactions Let’s jump right in. Setup: A creates an account E with her 9 XLM and sets all thresholds to 1. balance: 9 XLMsequence #: 1low threshold: 1med threshold: 1high threshold: 1 Account E B constructs two transactions, just like A did last time, except this time B will set the sequence number to be sequence number+2: **_TX A:_**Sequence #3 Pay B 3 XLMpay C 3 XLMPay D 3 XLM **_TX B:_**Sequence #3Pay B 3 XLMpay C 3 XLM A will construct a third transaction with the hashes of the transactions given to her by B: **_TX SETUP:_**Sequence #2Master Key weight: 0Add as a signer w/ weight: 1Add as a signer w/ weight: 1 TX A HASH TX B HASH A signs with Master Key E and submits it to the network. TX SETUP Woah, woah, woah, what just happened?!?! We now essentially have the same setup as before, but this time, the 9 XLM are locked — A has no way of accessing her funds. Even more important, since A cannot access account E, and are both guaranteed to be valid until one of them is spent. As a bonus, since B constructed both transactions and only sent the hashes to A, only B has the power to submit the final transaction. TX A TX B As per one of the comments on pt. 1 (thanks to Xavi): It would be interesting if you implemented time-bounds to those operations for when transaction A and transaction B can be sent by Bob (e.g. after 30 days, the house should be built). A can construct a third transaction, , that will refund her the 9 XLM if B doesn’t submit either transaction before a certain date. Here is the edited setup: TX C A creates an account E with her 9 XLM and sets all thresholds to 1. balance: 9 XLMsequence #: 1low threshold: 1med threshold: 1high threshold: 1 Account E B constructs two transactions, just like A did the last time, except this time B will set the sequence number to be sequence number+2: **_TX A:_**Sequence #3 Pay B 3 XLMpay C 3 XLMPay D 3 XLM **_TX B:_**Sequence #3Pay B 3 XLMpay C 3 XLM A will construct a third, refund, transaction that is only valid after X days: **_TX C:_**Sequence #3Pay A 9 XLM : X days Time bound A will construct a fourth transaction with the hashes of the transactions given to her from B and from her own refund transaction: **_TX SETUP:_**Sequence #2Master Key weight: 0Add as a signer w/ weight: 1Add as a signer w/ weight: 1Add as a signer w/ weight: 1 TX A HASH TX B HASH TX C HASH A signs with Master Key E and submits it to the network. TX SETUP Conclusion So where does the trust lie? We must trust B to make the correct judgement Yep, that is about it… Consider the alternative in Ethereum, NEO, EOS, etc. At some point, you would need to introduce trust into the system — someone has to make a final judgement on whether or not the service has been completed. Thus, for a simple, binary operation like this, where we are distributing payment based on an observable (but not necessarily programmatically observable) outcome, we can use a Stellar Smart Contract. SO BOOM! You now have a pretty complex smart contract implementable in JavaScript, Go, C#, Ruby, Python, Scala, Swift, and (soon to be) Rust, deployable for an affordable 0.00001 XLM/operation. THE CODE: is a basic example of adding a pre-authorized transaction as a signer written in JavaScript. Here Disclaimer: While I am a current employee of Stellar.org, these views represent my own and not those of SDF. That being said, these conclusions were developed while experimenting during my free time and are based on real code rather than personal biases. Disclaimer continued: While I stand by my words, I am a novice smart contract programmer and may be incorrect in my assumptions. If so, please comment below — I am always looking for feedback.

I Just Wrote a Stellar Smart Contract Pt. 2: Let’s Dig a Little Deeper

You may be wondering what Stellar assets are. The answer to that is, anything! Simply, a Stellar asset is an electronic IOU. That IOU can be anything that represents a good, value, or service. This ability to send and receive many varied type of assets makes the Stellar Network very powerful and flexible and opens it up to many use cases. What Can Assets Be Used For? Assets, known as tokens, are not created equal. Each asset, or token, can represent a specific good, service, or other value. Remember, a Stellar asset is an IOU that represents something else. Stellar assets can represent nearly infinite categories and specific values. A good example of Stellar assets would be your PayPal balance. When you send money to PayPal from your bank account, you are in fact trading your USD (fiat currency) for PayPal’s token (which is an unnamed token as both you and PayPal pretend that the PayPal token is actually USD). PayPal promises to honor your tokens with a USD cash payout to the payee of your choice. With this in mind, we can see the similarity between Stellar assets and modern online banking, except that your Stellar assets are not regulated or controlled by any agency, such as PayPal, other than yourself. A great example of a Stellar asset would be purchasing tokens for use at a batting cages. With those tokens we can receive a certain service, in this case we’ll receive 10 pitches for each batting cage token. Another potential use case for utility tokens might be API access. A company may issue their utility asset on the Stellar Network which would grant the purchasing company the ability to make an API call in exchange for every 0.0001/th of that asset, for example. This would increase security for APIs and allow more flexible oversight from the API publisher. Arcade companies might allow you to track your points and awards across any of their video game systems anywhere in the world by awarding you their Stellar asset based on your in-game performance. Finish first place in the race? Earn a token. 100 tokens? Upgrade your car’s engine. Playing the same racing game in an arcade in a different city? Login using your Stellar account and leave where you left off. Another example would be a company that issues a Stellar asset that represents an share of their company. Holding this form of token would be similar to purchasing stock in that company on a traditional stock exchange. With the above examples we can see how the IOU nature of Stellar assets can allow them to be used for representing value for nearly anything. We can simply see how a person can create a Stellar asset that represents gold, bus rides, movie tickets, game tokens, grocery store reward-program points, carbon emission credits, app store credits, and cash (US dollars, European Euros, English Pounds, and any other currency). To reiterate, Stellar assets are IOUs that can represent anything. Trustlines We know that Stellar assets are IOUs. You should know that, just like a real IOU where you need to trust the person that gives you that IOU, you need to trust the issuer of the Stellar asset before you trade for it. Let’s say that your friend gave you an IOU for a free beer the next time you go out for drinks but who (an unverified issuing account). When you go out to the pub and you ask him to pay for your beer he might refuse! That IOU is worthless . However, if your other friend, who is (a verified issuing account) and always honors his word and promises, gives you the same IOU it will now be worth something. is not trustworthy because of the person who issued it well known to be an honest person Another example would be purchasing a handful of tokens at the batting cages where each token is advertised to give you 10 pitches. If you purchase 10 tokens you would then expect 100 pitches. However, before you even bought the tokens you had to trust that the batting cages operator was going to provide you the advertised entertainment (100 pitches) in exchange for your USD. If that batting cages operator was villainous he could potentially take your money, issue you tokens, and refuse to provide you with your pitches (a horrible experience, to be sure). Theoretically, the token that he issued are nearly worthless (internet tokens aren’t even stamped on cheap metal) and the only real value that you can receive is if he honors those tokens as advertised. In this example, the batting cages token are Stellar assets. This is why on the Stellar Network you must first “trust” (also known as establishing a “trustline”) the issuer of each asset you wish to purchase. Only trust issuing accounts that have a verified status underneath their name. Trustlines have a limit and a balance. Initially, when you set a trustline, it has a balance of zero. The limit represents how much you trust the issuer of the asset. The balance represents how much of the asset you actually have. The balance can never be more than the limit. Lumens (XLM) are the only Stellar asset that are automatically trusted, do not require trustlines, and do not have trust limits. How Do I Buy Assets On StellarPort.io? StellarPort.io makes it easy to quickly purchase a wide variety of different assets while using the Stellar Network. Here’s how you do it. : Log in to your StellarPort account using your KeyStore file, Secret Key, or Ledger Nano S and navigate to the page. Step 1 Exchange Select whether you want to change the asset you are trading or receiving. (Make sure to check your wallet to ensure you have enough of the asset before you make a trade.) Step 2: Select the “Change” button to change which asset you will receive. Type the abbreviation of the asset you would like to trade for. In this case we will be trading for Bitcoin (BTC). Step 3: As discussed above, it is important that, when you are choosing which account to trade with in the sidebar menu during this step, that you only select a verified account. The verified symbol ensures that the home domain (the website and agency stated on top of the asset card) has actually issued that specific asset from that specific account. This is a two-way verification between the issuing account and the domain name on the the Stellar Network. This verification process is required for the “verified” symbol to appear and helps prevent inauthentic, unauthorized, or malicious entities from issuing assets. It is not recommended to trade with accounts that are not verified since you would be receiving a token from an unknown and potentially illegitimate entity who may or may not honor that token. It should be said that crypto asset trading in general includes a certain degree of risk and that even if the account is verified you must be sure to trust that account, a concept we discussed in the “Trustlines” section of this article. Step 1: Type in the abbreviation on the asset (BTC). Step 2: Select the network you want the transaction to go through. Only choose a network that you trust. Step 3: Confirm the asset type. Determine your sell (or buy) type. Market sells will sell at the best currently available price, as will market buys. Limit buys and sell allow you to determine the price for your assets. Next, determine how much of your assets you would like to sell or buy. Finally, submit your order! Step 4: Step 1: Buy or Sell? Step 2: Market or Limit Order? Step 3: How much are you selling/buying? Step 4 :Place order! Congratulations! You’ve made a successful order submission! You should receive a prompt letting you know of your success at the bottom right hand side of the web page. Your order can be seen in the on-screen “Orderbook” in the appropriate section (buys or sells). If your trade was completed you can find the history of it in the right hand side column “Recent Trades”. Step 5: Issuers and Anchors Any and all accounts on the Stellar Network can issue assets. Accounts that issue assets are called “anchors”. Private individuals as well as organizations and businesses can issue assets and act as anchors. For more information on becoming an issuer and running an anchor check out the official documentation here and here Anchors: Issuing Assets Custom Assets. Disclaimers: StellarPort.io is not a member of the Stellar Foundation. Additionally, I currently occupy a contracting position at StellarPort as a Developer and Marketer.

What Are Stellar Assets and How Do I Purchase Them on StellarPort.IO?

StellarPort: The Stellar Network exchange is launching a promotional giveaway StellarPort, the Stellar Network decentralized exchange, just launched their new advertising campaign. It’s a lottery based givaway for a minimum total of 10,000 XLM (Lumen)! StellarPort will hold their new Lumen Giveaway every Tuesday. If there is no winner the jackpot will roll over to the next week’s prize. There are 4 winners per week, dividing up the 10,000 XLM between the different winners. The prizes are as follows: Jackpot: 5,000 XLM, plus 50% of StellarPort’s weekly inflation payment*, plus any rollover from the previous week. 1st Place: 3,000 XLM. 2nd Place: 1,500 XLM. 3rd Place: 500 XLM. Your chance to win is based on the amount of XLM currently held in your wallet as well as your trade volume on StellarPort. *What is Inflation Destination? The Stellar Network uses a fixed 1% inflation scheme that adds new Lumen to the network weekly. It also adds the transaction fees that the Stellar network charges to that distribution pool. The network automatically awards those new Lumen to any account that has other accounts “vote” for it. The act of “voting” for another account to receive a portion of that pool of new Lumen is called “setting your inflation destination”. Votes are counted based on the amount of Lumen that the voting account holds. An account with 1 Lumen, for instance, would receive 1 vote while an account with 2 Lumen would have 2 votes, et cetera… In order for an account, such as StellarPort’s, to receive a portion of the inflation pool, it must receive votes from accounts that hold a combined total of at least .05% of all Lumen in existence. Any destination account that overcomes that 0.5% barrier during the voting period is awarded the newly injected Lumen in accordance with the percentage of votes it received. For instance, if people holding 2% of all Lumen pointed their Inflation Destination pointers at your account, you would receive 2% of the inflation pool. All unallocated Lumen returns to the pool for distribution the next week. StellarPort requires you to set their account as your Inflation Destination in order to enroll in their Giveaway, which is how StellarPort tries to cover their Giveaway expenses. Thanks for reading and good luck on that Stellar Giveaway! If you enjoyed this article, share it or applaud! If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. Disclaimers: StellarPort is not a member of the Stellar Foundation. Additionally, I currently occupy a contracting position at StellarPort as a Developer and Marketer.

StellarPort: Lumen Giveaway (10K XLM) and How Inflation Destination Works on the Stellar Network

Today, I got the opportunity to explore the of Stellar Lumens and make an . I guess I can finally cross that off my bucket list! The goal of this article is to push a simple transaction to the Stellar network. As I couldn’t find much technical ‘how-to’ information on Stellar, I decided to do it the old way: ! technical side analysis of the pros/cons RTFM Understanding Stellar It would be nuts to immediately dive into the code, therefore I found this high-level architectural overview guide on the Stellar . website API: Horizon All interactions with the Stellar network happen through , a RESTful HTTP API server. It allows developers to submit transactions, check account’s balance, and subscribe to events. You can use Horizon through your web browser, a command line tool like cURL, or the Stellar SDK which is the easiest solution. The Stellar SDK is available for . There are also community-maintained SDKs for . Horizon JavaScript , Java and Go Python, C#, and Ruby Stellar Core The Stellar Core is the backbone of the Stellar network, every Horizon server connects with it. The Stellar Core is responsible for validating transactions and reaching consensus. The core is run by a bunch of individuals creating a decentralized network. Each transaction on the network costs a small fee: 100 stroops (equal to 0.00001 XLM). The should prevent bad entities from spamming the network. _Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP)_SCP opts for safety over liveness — in the event of partition or misbehaving nodes, it halts the progress of the network until consensus can be reached. You can find more information on the protocol in their . whitepaper It is possible to become part of the network by running a Stellar Core instance. Such an instance can be easily set up with . Run Stellar Core with Docker stellar/quickstart docker image _Testnet_Luckily, Stellar provides a testnet for development purpose. Information can be found . here Let’s code Stellar : Basic knowledge of JavaScript, Express, and Async/Await. Prerequisites : Create two accounts on the testnet, fill the accounts with testnet tokens and transfer some random amount from one account to the other. At last, we want to be able to retrieve the transaction with the transaction explorer. In general, this Stellar coding tutorial teaches you the basics to get started with Stellar development. Goal Can be found , which makes following the tutorial easier. A complete snippet of the code is as well added at the bottom of the blog. Full working code: here Create Accounts The Stellar JavaScript SDK is the most stable SDK among the ones offered. You can easily install this package with npm: . npm i -S stellar-sdk We tell our Stellar SDK to use the testnet server URL: const server = new Stellar.Server('https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org')Stellar.Network.useTestNetwork() We are ready to create two random accounts. The Stellar SDK offers a function to randomly create a keypair without seed. let pairA = Stellar.Keypair.random()let pairB = Stellar.Keypair.random() This keypair contains a function to retrieve the public key and secret . pair.publicKey() pair.secret() Next, I’ve defined a route to initialize both accounts. In this function, we will create our wallet/account based on our public key and request the to send us 10.000 testnet Lumens on both accounts. I’m using the npm package for sending the request to the Horizon testnet API as this works well with async/await. We pass the public key from our first keypair via a query string. stellar friendbot request-promise await rp.get({uri: 'https://horizon-testnet.stellar.org/friendbot',qs: { addr: pairA.publicKey() },json: true}) The account is created now, but we don’t have the account object in our app. So, let’s retrieve this. accountB = await server.loadAccount(pairB.publicKey()) It’s now possible to check whether we got some Stellar Lumens on our account. accountA.balances.forEach((balance) => {console.log('Type:', balance.asset_type, ', Balance:', balance.balance)}) We repeat this code for as well in order to retrieve . pairB accountB Transfer Stellar Lumens A transaction can consist of multiple operations chained to the which creates the (multi-)transaction. To keep things simple, we will just transfer a small amount of testnet Lumens. We define the public key of as the destination. The amount transferred is equal to . The StellarSDK requires the amount parameter should be stated to seven decimal places. TransactionBuider pairB 30.0000001 const transaction = new Stellar.TransactionBuilder(accountA).addOperation(Stellar.Operation.payment({destination: pairB.publicKey(),asset: Stellar.Asset.native(),amount: '30.0000001'})).build() Cool, the transaction is ready to be signed by the initiator of the transfer — . Ok, now send this to the Horizon network: transaction.sign(pairA) const transactionResult = await server.submitTransaction(transaction) Retrieve History Code below will return only one transaction per ‘history page’. You can use the function on the ‘history page’ object to retrieve the next transaction in the history for an account. next() let historyPage = await server.transactions().forAccount(accountA.accountId()).call() We want to print the details of the operations in the transaction (which is XDR encoded). Let’s decode to base64 and loop over the transaction’s operations to print all sent amounts. let txDetails = Stellar.xdr.TransactionEnvelope.fromXDR(historyPage.records[1].envelope_xdr, 'base64') txDetails._attributes.tx._attributes.operations.map(operation => console.log(`Transferred amount:${operation._attributes.body._value._attributes.amount.low} XLM`)) At last, let’s retrieve the next ‘history page’. historyPage = await historyPage.next() That’s it? Yes, surprised? Did you know You can explore the transaction on the network — . The link is returned in the parameter: . example transactionResult transactionResult._links.transaction.href The metadata about the transaction is stored in the which is a standard data serialization format. You can deserialize it . XDR format here You can look up all transactions for a public key like . here The Stellar Analysis Pros Stellar is a payment engine, focused on asset movement where other blockchains may focus on the logic of the program itself. Stellar and Ripple are dealing with how your money is traded and sent, this is a more particular purpose. Stellar is easy to integrate for any web developer without knowing too much about blockchain. Perfect for payments / cross-currency / cross-border payments. Fast, cheap and easy to setup your own federated network: This is due to the consensus algorithm that does not use proof of work, but their custom . Stellar Consensus Protocol Very cheap fees: 0.00001 XLM per operation. A single transaction can contain multiple operations, so the fee doesn’t depend on the amount transferred. Cons Privacy — Every transaction can be found and read with a blockchain explorer. Important standards missing like payments links (still in development) that slow down the adoption. Payment links would handle the click on the link prompting the user for payment which is crucial for e-commerce. For now, you need to manually copy paste address, transaction memo and amount where Bitcoin has a one-click and approve payment option. It’s hard to determine if this is a : Stellar is not really using the concept smart contracts (it’s not Turing complete). It works for few popular use cases like escrow, time bounded and atomic transactions. However, standards can be extended for more use cases, but it will never get to the point of ‘Write your own DApp’. That’s ok as it makes Stellar optimized for this specific purpose of asset transfer, instead of being bloated by people’s fantasies. pro/con Stellar succeeded in removing the blockchain knowledge barrier even though it’s a blockchain payment provider. — Michiel Mulders Resources to become a Stellar expert Full code for this example on . Github Horizon API . docs Testnet . explorer Getting started code examples , and (react). here here here Check the of the Stellar network. status Interested in starting your own blockchain project, but don’t know how? Do you need help starting your token sale or having one audited? Get in touch with TheLedger . Full code : snippet

Exploring Stellar Lumens — Development Tutorial

Note: I am in no way affiliated with Stellar, or any other Cryptoasset for that matter. Destined to be the next Ripple… or maybe not? The closing week of 2017 and first few days of the new year saw the market cap of Stellar (XLM) skyrocket over 400%, from just over $3.5 billion on December 24th to a peak of over $16.5 billion on January 4th. (Source: ) https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stellar/ Source: CoinMarketCap This surge pushed Stellar up through the ranks of Cryptoassets (in terms of market cap). Stellar which was previously not even in the top 10, now ranked as high as number 6 overall (for a short while at least). With this surge came the media spotlight and shift into the public eye. CNBC even hailing Stellar as: “a new hottest cryptocurrency of 2018 so far”. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/02/theres-a-new-hottest-coin-of-2018-so-far-stellar.html A quick look at Google trends also show an uptick of search interest in Stellar of over 6 fold. (Period from December 5th to January 3rd): https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=stellar What Stellar is all about: Before going any further I urge potential investors to educate themselves on the Stellar network. Here are some great places to get started: _Stellar is a common financial platform that is designed to be open and accessible to everyone. This document outlines…_www.stellar.org Mandate _Browse our slideshow on How the Stellar Network Operates to get an overview of the technology and follow the path of a…_www.stellar.org Stellar Basics And a great intro video: My highlights and takeaways of the Stellar Network: Compared to it’s big brother, , transactions are executed much faster rate and at a massively smaller cost. Fast and cheap transactions: Bitcoin Unlike Ripple, Stellar’s control is much less centralized. Non-profit and decentralized: : Even a quick glance at Stellar’s documentation and API’s and it becomes evident Stellar is head and shoulders above many other popular cryptoassests. (As a side note: I believe assessment of code quality is hugely underutilized in today pricing of cryptoassets and one of the reasons I am bearish on projects such as Iota with poor documentation.) Great Code quality such as IBM and Deloitte**.** High profile partners What Now? Should I invest? After seeing Stellar’s recent price surge and what the network has going for it, the question becomes: does Stellar deserve this newly inflated valuation or is it merely the result of overly rose tinted speculation. As a new investor, seeing this sudden uptick in Stellar’s price may convince you that the ship has sailed and it is too late to get in on the action. Likewise for investor’s who held Stellar before and during the price surge, it is easy to think this is the peak and it’s time to cash out. It is not abnormal to think this way, but imagine for a second that you had bought Apple stock at $2 and saw it jump to $6. You might have felt the same way and decided to cash out. Lo and behold, Apple stock is trading at over $175 today. This is a long term game and for Stellar this is just the beginning.

Stories, News & Mentions about STELLAR

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