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.
DAOstack is an operational stack for DAOs, a comprehensive toolkit for decentralized collaboration at scale. It provides the governance and economic framework needed for collectives to self-organize around shared goals and interests. DAOstack is based on a fully open, modular and upgradable architecture. DAOs are open, self-organized collectives coordinated by economic incentives and self-executing code, cooperating around shared goals. Powered by the network effect, DAOs provide a revenue model and incentive for the production of open, shareable resources (such as open-source code and a music file). With the creation of more open resources, the DAO will be able to scale indefinitely while keeping its agility and coherence,and in many cases out compete existing corporate structures. DAOs have attracted top talents in the blockchain space, holding promise for more efficient and resilient organizations. Despite this, they have lacked critical elements to be successfully deployed so far, and in particular an adequate decentralized governance system. DAOstack is an operating system for DAOs. With DAOstack, thousands of open-source creators can jointly produce decentralized applications (DApps), while distributing individual ownership in the product to contributors of value. Crowd curators can cooperatively own and manage multi-valued ranking systems to compete with Yelp, TripAdvisor, or YouTube. And autonomous networks can run their collective investment or insurance fund. We believe DAOs will radically change the way people organize, from startups to corporations, to nonprofits and even nation-states. DAOstack develops the foundational elements needed to enable this transition to the future of work.