Stellar Network — SCP Federated BFT, 5-Second Finality, Built-in DEX
Stellar (XLM) is a payment-focused open network launched 31 July 2015 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim, running the Stellar Consensus Protocol — the first practical Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) system. It pairs a 5-second deterministic ledger with a protocol-native DEX, asset issuance primitives, and (since Protocol 20 in March 2024) Soroban WASM smart contracts. This page is the chain-level reference for Stellar's architecture, $206.4M TVL ecosystem, peer position against XRP, and developer surface — non-custodial throughout, no swap walkthroughs.
Stellar is purpose-built for one job: moving value between issuers, market makers, and end users with deterministic settlement, sub-cent fees, and a consensus model that does not require energy-burning mining or large stake bonds. Where Ethereum optimizes for general computation and Solana for raw throughput, Stellar optimizes for the payment rail: every account can hold and trade any issued asset (USDC, EURC, tokenized bonds, anchor-backed fiat) on a built-in order book (SDEX) with the same 5-second finality as a native XLM transfer. The network reached a turning point on 4 March 2024 when Protocol 20 activated Soroban, a Rust-based WASM smart contract environment that brought DeFi primitives — Blend Pools V2 ($128.96M TVL) leads lending, Aquarius ($30.94M) and Soroswap lead AMM trading — onto a ledger that previously offered only fixed operations. For users, the value proposition is concrete: 5-second confirmation on $206.4M of on-chain liquidity, no probabilistic finality window, no MEV reordering of the public order book, and wallet support spanning Lobstr, Freighter, Solar Wallet, Ledger and Trezor. AllSwap's /chains/stellar page surfaces all of this — TVL, top protocols, peer comparison versus XRP, and developer surface (Horizon RPC, stellar.expert, StrKey 'G' addresses) — without any custodial layer.
About Stellar
Stellar mainnet launched on 31 July 2015 — one day after Ethereum genesis — as a fork-evolution of the original Ripple codebase, founded by Jed McCaleb (also a Ripple co-founder) and Joyce Kim under the Stellar Development Foundation, a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit. Unlike most chains that emerged in the 2015–2017 cycle, Stellar never marketed itself as a 'world computer' or general-purpose L1. Its design brief from day one was a global value-exchange network for issued assets — fiat-backed stablecoins, tokenized securities, and remittance flows — where each account is an Ed25519 keypair encoded as a 56-character StrKey address with the 'G' prefix, and where every asset (other than native XLM) carries an explicit issuer reference. This architectural choice predates and influenced the modern stablecoin issuance model.
The consensus layer is the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), introduced in a 2015 white paper by Stanford's David Mazières as the first practical implementation of Federated Byzantine Agreement. Validators do not stake capital and are not elected by token holders; instead each node publishes a quorum slice — a list of other nodes it trusts — and ledger close occurs when overlapping slices reach federated agreement. This produces 5-second block time and 5-second deterministic finality without requiring proof-of-work energy expenditure or proof-of-stake bonding. The trade-off is honest: the trust model is reputational rather than economic, and the SDF historically operated several of the most-included validators — a centralization criticism the network has actively diluted by growing the public Tier-1 validator set since 2019.
Economically, XLM functions as a native gas token (with per-operation fees measured in fractions of a cent — typically 0.00001 XLM per operation, denominated in stroops), an anti-spam reserve requirement (currently 0.5 XLM per account plus 0.5 XLM per trustline or subentry), and the bridge asset for path-payment order routing across the SDEX. Total supply was capped at 50 billion XLM after the SDF burned roughly half the original 100 billion supply in November 2019 — a one-time deflationary event with no equivalent in the EVM or Bitcoin worlds. The network has no on-chain inflation since the inflation operation was disabled in Protocol 12 (October 2019).
The single largest architectural shift in Stellar's history arrived on 4 March 2024 with Protocol 20, which activated Soroban — a Rust-based WASM smart contract platform that sits alongside the native operation set rather than replacing it. Soroban contracts are deployed as SEP-41 tokens (the Stellar equivalent of ERC-20), can interoperate with classic Stellar assets, and brought composable DeFi to a ledger that previously offered only fixed operation types (payment, change-trust, manage-offer, etc). The current $206.4M TVL — concentrated in Blend Pools V2 lending ($128.96M, 62.5% share), Aquarius AMM ($30.94M), and the native SDEX ($15.37M) — is almost entirely a post-Protocol-20 phenomenon.
Stellar technical parameters
Stellar's technical profile is unusual in that it combines a classical settlement-network consensus model (federated, deterministic, sub-10-second) with a modern WASM contract VM bolted on without changing the underlying ledger semantics. This means the chain offers two distinct execution surfaces — native operations and Soroban contracts — and developers choose between them based on the workload.
| Consensus | SCP (Stellar Consensus Protocol — Federated Byzantine Agreement) |
|---|---|
| VM | Soroban (WASM smart contracts) + native Stellar operations |
| Block time | 5 s |
| Finality | 5 s |
| TPS | 100 typical / 5k max |
| Gas token | XLM |
| Launched | 2015-07-31 |
| Token standard | Stellar Assets (issuer + asset code) / Soroban tokens (SEP-41) |
| Address | StrKey (Ed25519, 'G' prefix, 56 chars) |
Consensus mechanism
The Stellar Consensus Protocol is a Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) system, not a Nakamoto-style longest-chain protocol and not a classical BFT with a fixed validator set. Each validator independently configures a quorum slice — a hand-picked list of other validators it considers trustworthy — and the ledger advances when these slices overlap sufficiently to form a system-wide quorum. There is no proof-of-work mining and no proof-of-stake bonding: a validator's influence comes from how many other operators include it in their slices, which is fundamentally a reputational signal. The practical consequence is 5-second deterministic finality (the block_time_seconds and finality_seconds are identical at 5s) with no fork risk and no reorg possibility once a ledger closes — the same transaction either commits to ledger N or it does not. The honest trade-off versus Ethereum's PoS (Gasper, 768s economic finality) or Solana's PoH+Tower BFT (12.8s) is that Stellar's safety guarantees are conditional on the quorum-slice configuration of the network being well-formed; an asymmetric or disjoint slice configuration could in principle stall the network, which is why the SDF maintains published reference slices that most node operators adopt with minor modifications.
Performance context
The data sheet shows 100 TPS typical and 5,000 TPS theoretical maximum — numbers that look modest next to Solana's 3,000 typical or Sui's 1,500, but the comparison misses the point. Stellar's 100 TPS is real, sustained settlement throughput for the chain's actual workload (asset issuance, path payments, DEX orders), and the 5-second finality is deterministic — there is no 'probabilistic confirmation' window where the receiver should wait for additional ledgers. Contrast: Ethereum's 15 TPS at 768-second economic finality, or Bitcoin's 7 TPS at 3,600-second 6-block finality. For payment-rail use cases — remittances, anchor-fiat off-ramps, B2B settlement — Stellar's deterministic 5-second close is closer to a card-network experience than to a typical blockchain confirmation flow. Per-operation fees remain in the fractions-of-a-cent range, denominated in stroops (0.0000001 XLM).
Stellar ecosystem map
Stellar's $206.4M TVL is concentrated in a handful of Soroban-era protocols that emerged after the March 2024 Protocol 20 upgrade, plus the long-standing native SDEX order book. The ecosystem is intentionally narrow compared to EVM chains — there are no dozens-of-forks layers — but every protocol below is from the chain's top_protocols data and represents a meaningful share of on-chain liquidity.
Lending
Blend Pools V2 — $128.96M TVL, roughly 62.5% of all Stellar TVL. A Soroban-native isolated-pool lending protocol that emerged as the dominant DeFi venue on Stellar after Protocol 20, with permissionless pool creation and risk-segmented borrowing markets.
DEX
Aquarius Stellar — $30.94M TVL. AMM-style liquidity provision built on Soroban that runs incentive programs over Stellar's classic asset rails, currently the second-largest TVL holder and largest non-lending venue on the chain.
DEX
Stellar SDEX (native order book) — $15.37M TVL. Not an external protocol but a ledger primitive: every account can place limit orders directly via the manage-offer operation, and path-payments route through the order book at protocol level — no smart contract or LP needed.
DEX
Stellar AMM (native) — $9.08M TVL. Built-in AMM pools added in Protocol 18 (CAP-38, 2021), giving Stellar a CFMM-style pool primitive at the ledger layer that interoperates with the SDEX order book for path-payment routing.
DEX
Sushi Stellar ($5.96M), Phoenix DeFi Hub ($1.62M), and Soroswap ($1.24M) — the secondary tier of Soroban-native AMMs, providing alternative routing venues and bringing UI patterns familiar from EVM DEX users into the Stellar ecosystem.
Infrastructure
DeFindex — $1.42M TVL. Yield-aggregator routing across the Soroban lending and AMM venues, demonstrating that the ecosystem now has enough underlying liquidity to support meta-protocols, not just base-layer venues.
| # | Protocol | Category | TVL |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Blend Pools V2 | Lending | $128.96M |
| 2 | Aquarius Stellar | Dexs | $30.94M |
| 3 | Stellar DEX | Dexs | $15.37M |
| 4 | Stellar AMM | Dexs | $9.08M |
| 5 | Sushi Stellar | Dexs | $5.96M |
| 6 | Phoenix DeFi Hub | Dexs | $1.62M |
| 7 | DeFindex | Yield Aggregator | $1.42M |
| 8 | Soroswap | Dexs | $1.24M |
Stellar vs peers
AllSwap categorizes Stellar in the '清算网络' (Settlement Network) group alongside XRP — the only other major chain purpose-built as a payment rail rather than a general-purpose VM. Both share federated BFT consensus, sub-10-second finality, and a built-in DEX, but they diverge sharply on smart contract surface and on-chain liquidity.
| Chain | Block | Finality | TPS | TVL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| xrp | 4 s | 4 s | 100 | $0.00 |
| Stellarcurrent | 5 s | 5 s | 100 | $206.47M |
Comparison insights
- Consensus shape — Stellar's SCP (Federated Byzantine Agreement) and XRP's XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol (federated BFT via UNL) are sibling designs: both reach agreement through hand-configured trust lists rather than economic stake. Both finalize quickly (Stellar 5s, XRP 4s) and both eliminate fork risk. Where they differ: SCP's quorum-slice model is more decentralized in principle (any node can publish its own slice), while XRP's UNL model is more curated by Ripple Labs.
- Smart contract surface — This is the defining difference today. Stellar activated Soroban (Rust-based WASM contracts) on 4 March 2024 and now hosts $206.4M of TVL on Soroban-native protocols led by Blend Pools V2. XRP has no general-purpose smart contracts on the main ledger ($0 TVL in the data) — it relies on the XLS-30 AMM amendment and hooks via a sidechain. For builders, this means Stellar is now a usable DeFi venue; XRP remains primarily a settlement and tokenization rail.
- Throughput — Stellar offers 100 TPS typical with 5,000 TPS theoretical max; XRP shows the same 100 TPS typical but only 1,500 TPS max. In practice both run well below their stated ceilings under real workloads, but Stellar's higher theoretical headroom reflects the room for Soroban contract parallelization on top of the native operation pipeline.
- Validator model — Both networks rely on publicly known validator operators rather than anonymous miners or staked node operators. Stellar's Tier-1 validator set has grown beyond the original SDF-operated nodes to include exchanges, anchors, and infrastructure providers. XRP's UNL is curated by Ripple with broader community input. Neither offers permissionless validator entry in the way Ethereum PoS or Solana PoS does — this is a deliberate trade-off for the settlement-network use case.
- Capital footprint — Stellar's $206.4M TVL versus XRP's $0 (per DefiLlama tracking) shows where on-chain liquidity has migrated post-Soroban. This does not mean XRP has no value flowing through it — it remains a major settlement asset by market cap — but DeFi-style TVL has moved to Stellar within the 清算网络 category.
Stellar timeline
Stellar mainnet launched on 31 July 2015, founded by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim through the Stellar Development Foundation. The original codebase forked from Ripple but diverged within months: in April 2015 (still on testnet), McCaleb and David Mazières published the Stellar Consensus Protocol white paper introducing Federated Byzantine Agreement, replacing Ripple's earlier consensus design. The chain saw its first major real-world stress on 15 May 2019 when a single SDF validator outage caused a roughly two-hour network halt — the kind of incident that gets glossed over in marketing but reveals the trade-off of a federated trust model: when quorum-slice topology depends heavily on a few well-connected nodes, losing one can stall consensus. The SDF responded by aggressively decentralizing the Tier-1 validator set and publishing guidance for diverse quorum-slice configurations. In November 2019 the SDF executed a one-time burn of 55 billion XLM, reducing total supply from 105 billion to the current 50 billion cap and disabling on-chain inflation in Protocol 12. The defining technical milestone arrived on 4 March 2024 with Protocol 20, activating Soroban — Stellar's WASM smart contract platform. This was a multi-year engineering effort and converted Stellar from a fixed-operation settlement network into a programmable chain, directly enabling the $206.4M TVL ecosystem now led by Blend Pools V2 and Aquarius. Honest framing: Stellar has not suffered a consensus-layer exploit or wrapped-asset bridge hack of the scale that has hit BNB Chain (the ~$586M cross-chain bridge exploit in October 2022), Solana (Wormhole $325M in February 2022, plus multiple chain outages), Ronin (the $625M Axie sidechain bridge hack in March 2022), or major Ethereum DeFi protocols. Its incident history is dominated by network halts (2019, plus shorter degradations) tied to validator-set topology, not theft.
- 2015-07-31launchStellar mainnet launch
- 2024-03-04upgradeSoroban smart contracts go live on mainnet (Protocol 20)
Developer reference
For developers, Stellar exposes a clean and well-documented surface. The official Horizon RPC endpoint is https://horizon.stellar.org (REST API, no JSON-RPC); Soroban contract calls use the soroban-rpc endpoint published in the official docs at https://developers.stellar.org. The canonical block explorer is stellar.expert. Address format is StrKey: Ed25519 public keys encoded as base32 with a checksum, producing 56-character strings prefixed with 'G' for accounts (e.g. GA7QY...). Asset references combine the asset code (1–12 alphanumeric characters) with the issuer's G-address — not a contract address. Native operations use the Stellar SDK (JavaScript, Python, Java, Go, Rust, iOS, Android), while Soroban contracts are written in Rust using the soroban-sdk crate and compiled to WASM. SEP-41 is the token interface standard (equivalent in spirit to ERC-20). Wallet support spans Lobstr (most popular mobile), Freighter (browser extension by SDF), Solar Wallet, plus hardware support via Ledger and Trezor. Native token is XLM; minimum reserve is 0.5 XLM per account plus 0.5 XLM per trustline.
Assets swappable on Stellar
Grouped by category. Click any asset to open its swap page for a live quote.
Stablecoins
1 assets
Majors
1 assets
Stellar settle-time comparison
Shorter bars mean faster confirmations. Real settle time also depends on network congestion — figures are indicative.
Stellar asset coverage comparison
Longer bars mean more assets are swappable on that chain.
Popular swap routes involving Stellar
Routes below reflect actual user preference. Click to jump straight to the swap page.
Stellar FAQ
01Is Stellar decentralized?
Partially. Stellar uses Federated Byzantine Agreement, where each validator publishes a quorum slice (a trust list) rather than staking capital. The Tier-1 validator set has expanded well beyond the original SDF-operated nodes to include exchanges, anchors, and infrastructure providers, but trust topology remains reputational rather than permissionless — anyone can run a node, but inclusion in others' slices determines actual influence. This is more decentralized than a single-operator chain and less so than Ethereum PoS or Solana PoS, which is a deliberate trade-off for the settlement-network use case.
02What is Stellar's finality time?
5 seconds, deterministic. Stellar Consensus Protocol produces full ledger close every ~5 seconds with no probabilistic confirmation window — once a ledger closes, the transaction is final and cannot be reorged. This is identical to the block_time (5s) because finality is per-ledger rather than per-block-confirmation. Compare: Ethereum PoS 768s economic finality, Bitcoin ~3,600s 6-confirmation finality, Solana 12.8s. For payment-rail applications, Stellar's deterministic 5-second close is among the fastest hard-finality settlement layers in production.
03What consensus mechanism does Stellar use?
Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), the first practical implementation of Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA). SCP was introduced in a 2015 white paper by Stanford's David Mazières. Unlike proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, SCP requires no energy expenditure and no economic staking bond. Validators express trust through quorum slices — explicit lists of other nodes they consider trustworthy — and the network reaches agreement when these slices overlap sufficiently. The model trades economic security guarantees for federated reputational ones.
04Does Stellar support smart contracts?
Yes, since 4 March 2024. Protocol 20 activated Soroban, a Rust-based WASM smart contract platform that runs alongside (not replacing) the native Stellar operation set. Soroban contracts use the SEP-41 token standard, compile from Rust to WebAssembly, and interoperate with classic Stellar assets. Before Protocol 20, Stellar only supported fixed operations (payment, change-trust, manage-offer, etc). The current $206.4M TVL ecosystem — led by Blend Pools V2 ($128.96M) and Aquarius ($30.94M) — is almost entirely Soroban-native.
05What is XLM and how are fees calculated?
XLM is Stellar's native asset, capped at 50 billion total supply after the November 2019 burn of 55 billion tokens. It serves three functions: gas token (per-operation fees, typically 0.00001 XLM = 100 stroops), anti-spam reserve requirement (0.5 XLM per account plus 0.5 XLM per trustline or subentry), and bridge asset for path-payment routing across the SDEX order book. Fees are denominated in stroops (1 XLM = 10,000,000 stroops) and total transaction fees are typically fractions of a US cent — orders of magnitude below Ethereum L1 or even most L2s.