One thing you're going to need to do when investing into crypto, is to move your crypto between wallets & exchanges. When this occurs you're going to run into a crypto traders worst nightmare, the fees. This fee isn't all evil however, most of the time it's meant to keep the network alive by rewarding the stakers or miners or being burned to increase the reamining coins' value. We still don't want to pay this however, what's a good fairly well adopted option to do so? Well there's Stellar.
Background
The stellar coin was created as a fork off of the Ripple coin all the way back in 2014. It's founder is the Stellar Development Foundation which is a non-profit organization. Due to the fork using most of Ripple's orignal code the Stellar Development Foundation was sued by Ripple's creator. The coin is meant to be a settlement network between banks and exchanges. The coin itself is meant as a store of value used for payments, similar to Bitcoin & Ripple but aiming to be quicker and cheaper to send and acquire. 100 billion coins was created when the network initially launched but upon feedback and popular vote by the community in a pool the supply was halved to 50 billion and the rule set to have the coin supply be increased by 1% per year was rendered NULL, meaning that the coin is no longer inflationary.
The coin itself has been critized for being fairly centralized, an example is in 2017 when there was 103 billion Stellar in circulation, the Stellar Foundation held around 96 billion. This creates uncertainity as the Foundation can sell off all their coins reducing the liquidity of the coin by over 95% and crashing the price. There can't be any more coins created either as Stellar usees a SCP protocol, where all coins are preminted, no more can be mined or staked. When the network was switched over to be more decantralized more problems arose as enough network nodes went down to create a crash of the network for two hours in May, 2019.
Network
The network isn't secured by miners or stakers, is this even a good option? That depends.
One big negative is that the network itself isn't a blockchain, the network has a set of predefined operations that can be executed on the network itself. However the nodes that run the network isn't known who the nodes actually are. All this uncertainity is kept in check by Stellar's FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) where nodes can join and leave freely. All the transactions are verified on a peer-to-pper basis between each node locally which check to verify that there are now overlapping transactions so network funds aren't lost.
All nodes and wallets that can hold coins keep a fixed minimum supply to stay live and be able to recieve more coins. This is to prevent spammers and scammers from quickly abusing the network. Each person that has at least 1 Stellar can vote on changes to the network as a whole, one such example is when the deflationary system was stopped in 2019. So even tho the netowkr is centralized, the foundation which hosts it has the users' best interest at heart it seems. The network's biggest weakness and strength is that it doesn't rely on miners/stakers to keep it healthy and secure, you're not subject to network load affecting your usage of the coin.
Use cases
The use cases is fairly similar to Bitcoin, transfer value. This coin is in the top 30 and has been listed on most exchanges which is good as it's main use case is transfers between exchanges. For example sending Ethereum from COINBASE to BINANCE might reach network fees up to 10$ depending on network load, Stellar will cost around 0.01$ without reliance on any miners or stakers keeping the network healthy. This means that you can transfer the coins no matter what and know your fee will remain low, which is amazing. It's not recommended to keep any signifcant value with Stellar if you are an advocate of DEFI, however you can use it for quick transfer to a different exchange/wallet then convert/swap it to a crypto you yourself trust. There are plans to increase the usage of the coin but today the coin remains a storage of value.
Stellar today
Stellar has been fairly steady and relible, however that is relative. The coin can be stable enough for quick transfers but it is in no way a stablecoin or anything close to the more stable cryptos. It tends to follow the swings of Bitcoin, as most of crypto does. Today it is still a good method of transfer and it hasn't suffered any major incidents since 2019, which is positive. Do not store anything with Stellar but use it to avoid fees. One great example where you can do that is if you use BRAVE and want to transfer BAT out of Uphold, Stellar will avoid the insane fees that Uphold implements, allowing you to withdraw even 1 BAT to your wallet/exchange.
