Since the start of this,
the greatest Bitcoin bull run in history,
there have been some massive gains in the altcoin market.
Perhaps, one of the strongest performers has been Stellar Lumens.
There are two driving forces behind the XLM rally.
No. 1: Widespread adoption as a blockchain.
At No. 2, the downfall of XRP.
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Now, in today's video,
we're going to talk about the success Stellar has seen in its adoption as a blockchain
and the current situation that could propel XLM into the stratosphere.
Then, at the end, I'm going to be giving you my personal price prediction for Stellar Lumens
for this bull cycle.
And it's one of the best ones yet,
so definitely make sure to stay tuned all the way until the end of this video for that.
Stellar was founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb.
Now, Jed McCaleb was the founder of Mt. Gox, the infamous Japanese Bitcoin exchange,
and the co-founder of Ripple.
Stellar received some initial funding from the payments startup Stripe,
as well as large corporate donors such as Google, BlackRock and Fast Forward.
Because of McCaleb's work on Ripple, Stellar was created as a hard fork of Ripple itself.
Like Ripple, Stellar was designed to be a decentralized payment network
that would allow international transactions between any currencies.
While Stellar is pursuing a similar goal as Ripple,
unlike Ripple, banks are not the primary target.
Stellar's motto is providing financial services to the unbanked.
The team behind Stellar is a colorful mix of experts from the financial, media and IT industries
who are dedicated to connecting people, businesses and institutions around the world,
rich and poor alike.
In a 2016 article that McCaleb wrote for Bitcoin Magazine, he said,
Why Stellar?
After years of working in the fintech space,
I realized that the world's financial infrastructure is fundamentally broken,
leaving billions without resources.
Since anyone can participate in the network,
it can be particularly helpful for the 2 billion unbanked people worldwide.
Stellar Consensus Protocol was developed by David Mazieres,
a professor of computer science at Stanford University.
This protocol operates within the peer-to-peer network of the Stellar ecosystem
and guarantees smooth operation with maximum security.
All nodes on the network communicate with each other and verify all transactions in a very short period of time,
like every 2 to 5 seconds.
This is when they reach a consensus with their trusted peers.
Each participating actor in the network could in theory create and manage its own server.
However, this does not mean that all peers within the network automatically trust each other blindly.
Continuous verification ensures that only trusted peers participate in the network.
This revolutionary technology attracted the attention of some major players in the tech and finance world,
with Stellar securing some major partnerships early on.
This included India's ICICI Bank and Tempo Money Transfer,
which operates a network of 190,000 locations in 120 countries.
Deloitte,
one of the "Big Four" accounting organizations and the largest professional services network in the world by revenue,
says that it reduced transaction costs by 40% by integrating Stellar into its IT systems.
However, without a doubt, the biggest and most famous of Stellar's early partnerships was with IBM.
Stellar saw a lot of early success with these early partnerships,
but they didn't stop there.
Just last year, Stellar made some seriously big moves.
Stellar announced that it would integrate with fintech company ClickPesa
to bring easy cross-border payments to consumers in Africa.
ClickPesa, a fintech company created by two Stellar Lumens developers, is a platform that offers
business-to-business payment services.
Also, they offer payment management, payment collection automation and currency exchange.
Another announcement was that one of the world's oldest banks,
Germany's Bankhaus von der Heydt,
and Bitbond, Germany's leading tokenization and digital asset custody technology provider,
teamed up to issue a Euro stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain.
That's right.
The EURB stablecoin is the first stablecoin issued directly by a banking institution on Stellar
and one of the first of its kind in the crypto market.
And in possibly even bigger news,
Stellar announced the addition of the stablecoin USDC to the Stellar Lumens blockchain.
Issued in 2018 by the CENTRE Consortium,
which is formed by crypto industry giants Coinbase and Circle,
USDC is the second largest stablecoin with a market cap of $5.45 billion
and the 12th largest crypto by market cap overall.
And if that wasn't enough,
the recent announcement was that Ukraine's government had chosen the Stellar blockchain network
as a platform to build a central bank digital currency or CBDC.
With all these huge announcements for Stellar,
it's easy to see why many people are looking to Stellar to be the most likely blockchain candidate
for the issuing of one of the most highly anticipated CBDCs,
the US digital dollar.
If you think the US digital dollar is just a distant dream that will never come to reality,
or at least in your lifetime,
you're very wrong.
Unless you're 85.
Just in June of last year, the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on the digital dollar and its future.
The pressure is mounting to create a digital USD
as China recently began testing its own digital currency,
the Digital Currency Electronic Payment or DC/EP,
which will be integrated into popular applications like WeChat and Alipay.
This creates concern of widespread adoption of a digital yuan
in emerging markets and international trade,
and makes the creation of the digital USD even more critical for the United States
to maintain its top economic position.
All this huge news for Stellar couldn't come at a better time.
Stellar's biggest competitor and the hard fork that it originated from, Ripple, is under heavy fire.
Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit against Ripple Labs in December,
claiming that Ripple violated investor-protection laws when it sold a digital asset called XRP.
According to the suit,
Ripple engaged in this illegal securities offering from 2013 to the present,
even though Ripple received legal advice as early as 2012
that under certain circumstances XRP could be considered an "investment contract"
and therefore a security under the federal securities laws.
As a result, multiple exchanges have announced suspension of trading and delisting of XRP
including Coinbase, Crypto.com, OKCoin, Blockchain.com, Binance.US and Bittrex,
just to name a few,
with many more likely following suit soon.
As a result, XRP has been in a death spiral,
dropping from 73¢ to as low as 17¢ in just one month.
While the price has recovered a little,
now sitting around 26¢,
the future of XRP is very uncertain.
Depending on the outcome of the SEC lawsuit,
it may spell the end of XRP as we know it.
With XLM being the best and closest competitor to XRP,
this might be the best thing that could happen to Stellar.
And with all the major moves that they're making, it might be a very bright future for this coin.
So bright in fact,
that I believe the price will be strongly impacted by the XRP market share it might be able to take.
I believe XLM has a potential to go up 25 times from its current price around 25¢.
It's a much higher prediction than I would have given it before the XRP news,
but a $6.25 XLM could be possible in a blow-off top altcoin run.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm bullish on XLM.
Do you think that Stellar is going to be the No. 1 decentralized payment network for international transactions?
Or is XRP gonna beat the SEC lawsuit
to recover and become the biggest cross-border payment platform in the world?
Drop me your comments down below
and also make sure to give me your Stellar price prediction.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.