Stellar has a rocketship logo and is a copy of Ripple
I went to do research on Stellar and the first thing that came up was Jed McCaleb. Apparently the guy is a genius, the same genius that ran Mt Gox when it was hacked. Everyone makes mistakes, hopefully he is more cognisant of security now. He also dabbled in the co-founding of Ripple. I keep hearing about Ripple I guess it is some enormously successful cryptocurrency or something.
Team
See above rainmaker status. Also his girlfriend co-founded it with him. She is apparently an egomaniac but also an Ivy league educated lawyer and VC. The TL;DR version is they are both brilliant with terrible people skills. This is great for founding a company, but bad for running it. Thankfully Joyce is now just on the board and they have a handful of MBAs in leadership but they all look a bit light on running the company type experience.
Technology
Turns out Ripple’s technology is open source. Well turns out Stellar’s technology is basically Ripple’s tech with the name changed. Granted Jed made the tech initially so in theory he could improve upon it. Also they have different names.
One way they are actually different is from an inflation perspective, Stellar is explicitly inflationary and creates new tokens and recycles fees. Ripple is the exact opposite they destroy fees and tokens which in theory would increase the price over time as the network is utilized.
Stellar also uses a different consensus mechanism than Ripple. There are also some differences in security which can essentially be boiled down to Ripple being more robust but less secure while Stellar is more secure but less robust.
Market
The financial transfer market is so big it boggles the mind. The global remittance market alone moves $429B a year. Interbank settlements and the myriad of other ways to move money around the world are equally large in scale, traditionally slow, and ripe for disruption.
Final word
All in Stellar is an interesting little brother to Ripple. Both are targeting a large market and have compelling tech to tackle it. Ripple is a few years ahead and has some key banking partners and a solid team. Stellar has a partnership with IBM but the operations team seems a bit lacking. Though you can always hire solid executives when you need them. Ultimately the tech has been proven in the market so you can bet on Stellar to grow and win business.
To do your own research have a look at How to evaluate Altcoins like a Venture Capitalist
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