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.
Zebi is a young and innovative organization founded, mentored and managed by Oxford, MIT, Stanford, and IIT veterans and thought leaders from Silicon Valley with experience in Google, Uber, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle. Zebi specializes in providing Blockchain based offerings to governments and enterprises to leverage and protect their high value and sensitive data. India’s big data generation is increasing exponentially and is expected to reach 3 Zebibytes per year (Zebibyte = 1024^7 bytes) by 2020, driven by continued growth of internet usage, social networks, proliferation of smartphones, as well as the digital initiatives and structural reforms undertaken by the government. At the same time, incidents of data crimes such as data hacks, data leaks, data tampering, identity thefts are on the rise, which are costing Indian organizations and consumers more than $30 billion annually. Zebi specializes in providing blockchain based solutions to governments and enterprises to leverage and protect their high value and sensitive data. Zebi is one of the few enterprise grade product companies based in India offering best of the expertise of Silicon Valley at Indian prices Recognizing the need and opportunity to enable with technology the enforcement of data protection regulations, Zebi has created a Blockchain driven, unique and holistic solution to make high value and sensitive data readily available for legitimate use. Zebi safeguards data against hacking and tampering, while obtaining consent from individuals. The solution comprises of Zebi Chain™ to provide immutability to critical records, coupled with a central hub called Zebi Data Gateway which enables secure and instant data exchange through Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) APIs. Zebi’s innovative, proprietary solution set is one of the first in industry and is patent pending.