Want me to explain Stellar Lumens(XLM) like you are a 5 years old? Here you go!
Stellar Lumens (XLM)
One of Ripple’s co-founders, Jed McCaleb, left Ripple to form Stellar on account of philosophical differences with regards to how the system should be used. Stellar was created as a clone of Ripple’s payment processing system, but with some changes to account for the differing perspective. Rather than focus on a clientele exclusive to banks and payment processing systems, Stellar’s focus is to bring banking services to everyone - including those that lack access to banking systems.
Ripple’s system is tightly controlled by Ripple, only permitting select people and organizations to participate in the consensus forming process. Stellar, however, has made its system open source, permitting anyone to participate in the consensus forming process. This places Stellar’s system much closer to being decentralized than Ripple’s system is.
Stellar uses the XLM token to quickly and cheaply transfer value across a network. XLM was not designed to be used as a currency directly. Instead, it was designed to be an intermediary between other currencies or stores of value. The idea behind this notion is that it is faster and cheaper to send the XLM token than it is to send actual currencies or stores of value. As such, XLM is used as a representation of value while it is being transferred over Stellar, with the expectation that it is converted to the desired currency or store of value after the transaction is complete.
According to Stellar,
“Stellar makes it possible to create, send, and trade digital representations of all forms of money: dollars, pesos, bitcoin, pretty much anything. It’s designed so all the world’s financial systems can work together on a single network.”
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For more in depth information about Stellar Lumens, see Stellar.org.
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