Welcome to the beginning of your Stellar journey. Stellar, founded in 2014, was created by Ripple co-founder, Jed McCaleb, who left due to philosophical differences with the rest of the board.
Thus, Stellar was originally a Fork of Ripple. Later, Stellar completely changed its protocol (how it works behind the scenes), and the team wrote completely new code.
Stellar’s target audience begins with people in poverty, because surprisingly as Joyce Kim, executive director of Stellar, says, “It’s expensive to be poor”.
Kim also states, “Without internet, there’s no free Paypal, no free Venmo”. Instead, using the banks in developing countries can cost you up to 25% of your daily income. This leads to situations where people in poverty use assets other than cash because it is cheaper and more reliable. For example, livestock, such as pigs, are commonly used in Nicaragua as assets, a country in central America.
The financial system is broken “because there aren’t a lot of roads”. If you want to send money through different countries, there are a lot of governments and tolls along the way.
This is where Stellar comes in. Their goal is to “move money across borders quickly, reliably, and for fractions of a penny” … in the same way that we can send e-mail.
They believe everyone should to be able to connect to the world’s economy, while maintaining low barrier to entry, flexibility and security.
Not only can Stellar be used by people, but banks, businesses, and developers, too.
This syllabus will first cover how Stellar works, and the technology behind their network. After that, we’ll dive into the Stellar team, their partnerships, how you can purchase Stellar Lumens, how you can get involved, and what the future may look like.
