Gulden is a second-generation peer-to-peer cryptocurrency which was created to provide a secure, simple and fast method of performing financial transactions between private individuals, customers & service providers and also corporate entities. Like many recent cryptocurrencies, the primary design criteria were to improve the security and usability of the currency and its underlying transaction authorisation technology (when compared to the original cryptocurrency - Bitcoin). The purpose of these changes was to simplify use and increase its adoption as a convenient, cheap and safe form of payment. The original initiative for this currency came from Rijk Plasman with the first working implementation released on the 4th April 2014. Initially called the “Gulden coin”, this was subsequently abbreviated in October 2015 to “Gulden”. The name Gulden comes from the German and Dutch term for “gold coin” and is the Dutch name of the Dutch guilder, the pre-euro currency of the Netherlands. Gulden Coin is the currency that enables the user to pay safely, conveniently and quickly. Moreover, it is a lucrative investment opportunity at the moment, considering that since entering the market in 2016 the developers have increased to a market capital of 39,883,259 USD with about 800,000 USD. The model of making cryptocurrencies accessible to ordinary consumers in the future holds enormous potential in the fintech sector.
The Stellar network is an open source, distributed, and community owned network used to facilitate cross-asset transfers of value. Stellar aims to help facilitate cross-asset transfer of value at a fraction of a penny while aiming to be an open financial system that gives people of all income levels access to low-cost financial services. Stellar can handle exchanges between fiat-based currencies and between cryptocurrencies. Stellar.org, the organization that supports Stellar, is centralized like XRP and meant to handle cross platform transactions and micro transactions like XRP. However, unlike Ripple, Stellar.org is non-profit and their platform itself is open source and decentralized. Stellar was founded by Jed McCaleb in 2014. Jed McCaleb is also the founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple, launched the network system Stellar with former lawyer Joyce Kim. Stellar is also a payment technology that aims to connect financial institutions and drastically reduce the cost and time required for cross-border transfers. In fact, both payment networks used the same protocol initially. Distributed Exchange Through the use of its intermediary currency Lumens (XLM), a user can send any currency that they own to anyone else in a different currency. For instance, if Joe wanted to send USD to Mary using her EUR, an offer is submitted to the distributed exchange selling USD for EUR. This submitted offer forms is known as an order book. The network will use the order book to find the best exchange rate for the transaction in-order to minimize the fee paid by a user. This multi-currency transaction is possible because of 'Anchors'. Anchors are trusted entities that hold people’s deposits and can issue credit. In essence, Anchors serves as the bridge between different currencies and the Stellar network. Lumens (XLM) Lumens are the native asset (digital currency) that exist on the Stellar network that helps to facilitate multi-currency transactions and prevent spams. For multi-currency transactions, XLM is the digital intermediary that allows for such a transaction to occur at a low cost. In-order to prevent DoS attacks (aka spams) that would inevitably occur on the Stellar network, a small fee of 0.00001 XLM is associated with every transaction that occurs on the network. This fee is small enough so it does not significantly affect the cost of transaction, but large enough so it dissuades bad actors from spamming the network. The collected fee is then redistributed and added to an inflation pool. This inflation pool releases Lumens at a rate of 1% each year.