Stellar
KLEAR3 ResearchPublished Updated
StellarXLMStellar is a payment network co-founded in 2014by Jed McCaleb, previously a co-founder of Ripple. Its consensus pays no one: fees burn into a locked account forever, and a real vote switched off the network's own inflation rule in 2019. A 2017 bug that created lumens from nothing was fixed by burning them back out.
What does Stellar actually do?
Stellar moves money between people and institutions by letting any account hold, trade and pay in assets other than its own lumens, through accounts that extend trust to an issuer and a trading engine built into the protocol itself, not a smart contract bolted on top.
An asset on Stellar is not a separate token contract: it is created the moment an issuing account makes a payment in it, and whoever controls that issuing account controls the asset for as long as it exists. A euro-backed token, a dollar-backed token, a loyalty point: each is just a payment from an account willing to stand behind it, read by a wallet that chooses to trust that account.
Trading those assets does not need a separate marketplace either. The ledger itself keeps an order book, and two native operations, ManageBuyOffer and ManageSellOffer, let any account post one. Orders are matched by price first, then by submission time, which is the same rule most exchanges use, except here it runs inside the consensus protocol rather than on a company's servers.
The organisation also names a second product called Soroban, a smart-contract platform that compiles Rust to WebAssembly rather than adding a new chain. We have not examined it, so this page says nothing about it beyond its existence.
Source developers.stellar.org, read 2026-10-14
Is the code actually open?
The code has been fully public since 2014, carries the Apache 2.0 licence despite what GitHub's own detector claims, and has shipped 243 tagged releases. No firm has ever audited the consensus code that runs the ledger itself, only the newer smart-contract layer built on top of it.
GitHub's own API reports this repository's licence as NOASSERTION, which reads as "no licence detected". Open the files yourself and the detector is simply wrong: a complete copy of the Apache License, Version 2.0 sits in the repository, alongside a copyright notice signed by the Stellar Development Foundation. The code is not unlicensed, a piece of tooling just failed to recognise it.
Source stellar/stellar-core — LICENSE-APACHE.txt, COPYING, read 2026-10-14
No audit firm has reviewed stellar-core itself, the software that actually runs consensus and settles payments, and no report for it is listed anywhere. What does exist is a programme of real, named audits for contracts built on top of the network through a community-funded security bank, a different layer entirely from the one this page is about.
That is not a safety guarantee either way. It means the review this code has had is public scrutiny over more than a decade, not a dated report with a firm's name on it — a different kind of evidence, and one this site treats as weaker on its own.
Source stellar.org — Audit Bank, read 2026-10-14
Is anyone still working on it?
Yes, and steadily: 223 commits over 90 days from 14 distinct Git identities, the most recent landing on the day before we checked. That is a maintained, actively staffed codebase, not a project coasting on a decade of old momentum, not a dormant repository kept alive by habit.
223 commits from 14 Git identities over ninety days is a real pace for a chain that opened its repository in 2014, and it says something plainer than any marketing page could: whatever this network is, it is not unmaintained.
One caveat travels with every count on this site: ninety days is a window that slides on its own, and identities are not people — one engineer can sign under two names, and a company can hide behind one.
Source GitHub, read 2026-10-14
What shows it is running
- The network answers, and we timed its own cadence — ledger 64,936,015, closed 2026-10-14T08:17:37Z
- The repository is still being worked on — 223 commits over the 90 days to 2026-10-14, 14 distinct Git identities
Source Horizon (horizon.stellar.org) · GitHub, read 2026-10-14
- The current stellar-core repository goes public
- The rewritten, SCP-based network closes its early ledgers
- The lumen-creation bug is finally, fully fixed
- Validators vote to end the network's own inflation rule
Where does it actually run?
On one network, its own, which we read directly: a public instance of its own server answered with ledger 64,936,015 on the day we checked, closing roughly every 5 seconds. Stellar has never run as a token wrapped onto someone else's chain.
We asked Stellar's own public infrastructure directly, twice, five ledgers apart, and timed the gap ourselves: 64,936,015 closed at 08:17:37 UTC, five ledgers after one that had closed 25 seconds earlier. That cadence, not a number copied from a brochure, is what "every few seconds" actually means here.
A single ledger also means there is nowhere else for a bridge exploit to hide: whatever happens to a lumen happens on this one chain, read by one set of validators who each choose which others to trust rather than racing for a block reward.
Source Horizon (horizon.stellar.org) · developers.stellar.org, read 2026-10-14
StellarNetwork verified by reading its current block height on a public node.
What the token actually does
It pays the base fee for every operation, and that fee goes nowhere: Stellar burns it into a locked account rather than paying a miner or a validator. There is no capped total and no active emission schedule, because the one that existed, a 1% yearly inflation rule, was switched off by a real vote in 2019.
The base fee is 100 stroops per operation, and a stroop is worth one ten-millionth of a lumen. Whatever that adds up to on a given transaction does not go to whoever closed the ledger: it is sent to a locked account with no signer, where it is gone for good.
Source developers.stellar.org, read 2026-10-14
There is no maximum supply written into the code. 35,132,125,045.519 XLM circulate today out of 50,001,786,839.699 that exist in total, per the aggregator we read; what used to grow that total every year, a 1% annual issuance, was ended by a validator vote on 2019-10-28, and nothing has replaced it since.
Source CoinGecko · developers.stellar.org, read 2026-10-14
Holding an account at all costs something too: every account needs a minimum balance of 1 XLM, and each trustline, offer or extra signer it adds raises that floor by 0.5 XLM more.
Source developers.stellar.org, read 2026-10-14
- In circulation35,132,125,045.519
- Issued, not circulating14,869,661,794.18
- What the token is forDirectly verified
- How many existDirectly verified
- How new ones appearDirectly verified
- Who received themNot verified
- Who can change the rulesDirectly verified
The KLEAR3 rating
4.1out of 5 in the KLEAR3 rating
Each axis gets 0 to 5 from the facts in the register, against thresholds written in advance. The overall score is their weighted average, and it only appears once at least 5 of the 6 axes rest on a measured fact.
- Audits ×1.3
- Open code ×1.2
- Business model ×1.1
- Token alignment ×1
- Governance ×1
- Maturity ×0.7
- Open code5
public repository · Apache-2.0 licence · 243 published releases · 223 commits in 90 days
- Audits3
code reviewed in the open: 223 commits in 90 days, 11 years in production
What holds it back 7 public audits around the token — the bridge, the cross-chain transfer — none on the contract itself · no report opened: we do not know what they found
- Business model5
business model published by the protocol · paid by whoever sends the transaction · collected by nobody: no validator and no miner ever receives it · into a locked account with no signer, permanently unreachable
- Governance5
decided by a public proposal process (CAP), with no vote · 100 improvement proposals published · process open for 12 years
- Token alignment2
supply measured, with no cap: nothing bounds issuance · circulating share known · emission schedule published · terminal inflation 0% a year
What holds it back fate of the initial allocations not established
- Maturity5
11 years of public code · 1 network verified by us
We rate the protocol: how it is built, how much of it can be checked, how its token lines up. Never an investment. A high score is not advice to buy, and a low one is not advice to sell.
What we could not establish
Two things a reader should weigh. We do not have a current breakdown of who actually holds the lumens that are not yet circulating, beyond the one dead account the Foundation burned part of its own holdings into. And nobody has commissioned an independent audit of stellar-core itself, the code that runs consensus.
The gap between circulating and total supply, 14,869,661,794.18 XLM, sits somewhere between accounts we have not individually traced, the Stellar Development Foundation's own treasury among them. We know where some of it went in 2019; we have not mapped the rest.
Our rating gives Stellar a modest score on the audit axis for exactly this reason: a decade of public code is real evidence, but it is not the same evidence as a dated report with a firm's name attached to it.
Frequently asked questions
Do Stellar's transaction fees pay anyone?
No, and that is almost unheard of in this list. Every lumen collected as a fee is sent to a locked account with no signer, where it stays forever. No validator, no miner and not even the Stellar Development Foundation can ever spend it.
The base fee itself is tiny, 100 stroops per operation, one ten-millionth of a lumen multiplied by 100. What happens to it afterward is the unusual part: the network removes it from circulation rather than paying it to whoever closed the ledger.
That design removes a whole category of argument this site has to make for every proof-of-work chain it covers: nobody here has an incentive to reorder transactions for a bigger cut, because there is no cut to fight over in the first place, which is also why nobody needs to trust a validator's good behaviour to use the network safely.
Did Stellar really create lumens out of thin air?
Yes, twice in the same week, and it took 3 attempts at a fix before a fourth release finally closed it, in April 2017. A bug let a merge-account operation credit the same balance more than once; the first 2 patches only slowed the pattern of transactions exploiting it.
The final fix, version 0.6.2, stopped the network from ever caching account data between operations again, and it added a standing check that the total supply always equals what the ledger actually contains, a rule that still runs on every ledger closed today.
We read the account the Foundation burned those lumens into, on the chain, the same day we wrote this page: it still holds the balance, its one signer carries 0 weight, and every threshold on it is set to 0. Nobody can ever move a stroop out of it again.
Can Stellar's validators actually change the rules?
Yes, and they have, in public, more than once. A documented, versioned proposal process has run openly since 2014, and the clearest example is not hypothetical: validators voted to end a built-in 1% yearly inflation rule in October 2019, and it has stayed off ever since.
100of these proposals are on record in the project's own repository today, open since August 2014, and the repository has taken well over 1,226 merged contributions in total, which is a different kind of evidence than a single team deciding alone.
What the process does not do is put that choice to a token-weighted vote: there is no governance token here, and no stake to lock. The validators who run the network are the ones who vote on changing it, which is a narrower group than everyone who holds lumens.
Where to read on, at the source — every address answered 200 on 2026-10-14.
Read next: our XRP profile covers a ledger built by a different co-founder of the same original project, and our methodology sets out what counts as a source here.
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