Stellar (XLM)
Stellar ranks #12 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #19: 7 of the 18 assets ahead of it are not native coins but tokens or claims. A token is issued on a host blockchain rather than running its own; a claim stands for an asset already counted. Of the 12 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, 9 are claims on other assets and 3 are tokens.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A · 70/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #12 |
| Rank counting claims | #19 |
| Market capitalisation | $5.1B |
| Price | $0.1436 |
| Circulating supply | 35,372,662,517 XLM |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Federated |
| Consensus mechanism | Stellar Consensus Protocol (FBA) |
| Active addresses a day | 984,969 October 2026 median, Coin Metrics |
| Network purpose | Settlement ledger |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
| Regulatory class | Commodity |
Market figures from the 10 November 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
CoinSpectrum Grade (Source)
A — 70 out of 100, provisional (from 10 of 10 sections, 10 November 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 67 to 72 (A to A).
| Section and criteria | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Consensus | 8.2 | average of 2 criteria |
| By leader (its largest chain's market cap) (Source) | 8.2 | Federated: 8.2 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| By family (all its chains' market cap) (Source) | 8.2 | Federated: 8.2 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Supply | 5.9 | the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds |
| Supply (21 million scores 10) | 6.5 | no fixed maximum; 35.4 billion in circulation |
| Distribution | 7.2 | average of 4 parts |
| Holder concentration (Source) | – | Not yet measured |
| Active addresses | 10 | 984,969 addresses active a day, the median of October 2026's 31 days (Coin Metrics community data) source |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 0 | 100% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. 100B lumens were created at genesis in 2014 by the Stellar Development Foundation; the only later issuance was a 1%/yr inflation paid to existing holders via inflation-pool voting (ended 2019), and SDF burned ~55B in Nov 2019, leaving ~50.0B total (CoinGecko total 50,001,786,837; Horizon's total_coins of ~105.4B still counts burned lumens). No open minting has ever existed. source |
| Fundraising (share sold) (Source) | 8.7 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 13.4% of supply sold. Range 4.0-22.8%, midpoint given. Stripe bought 2B lumens for $3M at the 2014 launch (2B / ~50.0B current supply = 4.0%). SDF also funds its operations by selling lumens from its SDF Development (Direct Development) account on exchanges and in direct sales. That account fell from 11,954,850,982 to 2,570,374,111 XLM (SDF mandate page, Oct 2026), a drop of ~9.38B, but SDF publishes no cumulative sales total and part of the drop may be transfers to its 2025 restructured accounts, so (2B + up to 9.38B) / 50.0B gives an upper bound of 22.8%. Stripe provided $3M seed funding to the Stellar non-profit at launch (July 2014) and received 2% of the initial lumens (2B). The planned distribution was 50% direct sign-up, 25% non-profits, 20% bitcoin/ripple holders, 5% foundation operations. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No protocol cut. Stellar's only post-genesis issuance was the 1%/yr inflation (2014 to protocol 12, October 2019), paid to whichever accounts holders voted for via their inflation destination; the protocol did not route any of it to SDF or a treasury, and issuance has since ended. source |
| Decentralisation | 4 | average of 3 parts |
| Governance (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: Asset issuers can freeze or claw back their own issued assets, but native XLM cannot be frozen or clawed back by any party. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: stellar-core (Apache 2.0) is developed in the Stellar Development Foundation's repository by SDF-employed engineers, and SDF drives the protocol roadmap and CAPs. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 2 | Gated by registration: producers admitted by name, licence or company registration: an allow list, federation, council or proof of authority |
| Nodes (Source) | – | Not yet counted |
| Security | 8.5 | 6.8 of 8 points source |
| Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points) | 10 | largest 10%, largest three 30% |
| Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points) | 10 | about 3,750,000 transactions a day |
| Hashrate (Own work 5, its power 1 kW 0 to 10 GW 5; 1 point) | 1 | not mined: another consensus, 1 |
| Clients (Separate code and teams 10, separate code or teams 9, a fork by the same team or a stale second 8; one client: a new version within 12 months 7, 24 months 6, none in 24 months 5, none in 48 months 3; a second in development +0.5, a second seen running +1, 8 at most with one client; chain ended 0; 1 point) | 7 | one client, latest version Oct 2026 |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Scalability | 7 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.000002 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 5.8 | about 200 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 2.5 | a block every 5 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (24 MB or more 10: the ten busiest networks' median demand, 16.4 MB, and half again for growth) | 10 | 2.96 MB limit, 355 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 6.7 | 2 of 3 passed |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper abstract, §1, §2 and §11) | ✓ | SCP closes a ledger about every 5 seconds with deterministic finality, so a payment is final once its ledger closes. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✓ | stellar-core validates from current ledger state and catches up from history archives; keeping and publishing full history is optional. |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✗ | No light-client protocol; clients trust Horizon/RPC servers. |
| Privacy | 2.3 | 2.3 of 10: whitepaper privacy 2.3 of 7, extra features 0 of 3 source |
| Protocol level privacy (Keys not tied to an identity · Whitepaper §10) | 10 | Any keypair becomes an account once funded with the base reserve; stellar-core carries no identity check for lumens. |
| UTXO ledger (Separate outputs, change to a new address · Whitepaper §2, §9) | 0 | An account ledger: one running balance for each address, so the remainder stays at the sending address and its payments share one public history. |
| HD addresses (A new address for each payment, unlinked · Whitepaper §10) | 0 | Ed25519 keys under SLIP-0010 allow hardened derivation only: each new address needs the private seed, and no public key derives them (SEP-0005) |
| Hidden amounts (Amounts confidential) | 0 | No confidential transactions in the protocol. |
| Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden) | 0 | No sender or receiver hiding. |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | 0 | stellar-core floods transactions to peers directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| Programmability | 8.9 | 8 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (At protocol level) | 2 | Issued assets native to the Stellar protocol, open to any funded account, and Soroban smart contracts since February 2024. |
| Smart contracts (General-purpose) | 2 | Soroban Wasm smart contracts on mainnet since February 2024 (protocol 20). |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✓ | Native weighted multisig with thresholds, plus time bounds and minimum sequence age/ledger gap preconditions. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✓ | Hash(x) signers combined with time bounds, which the docs name as useful for atomic cross-chain swaps. |
| Native DEX (Trades the coin itself, not a claim) | ✓ | Traded as itself, not as a wrapped token or a claim: an exchange in its own protocol (SDEX order book (Manage Buy/Sell Offer) and constant-product liquidity pools built into the protocol); its own chain's DEXes (Stellar, DefiLlama). |
| Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself) | ✗ | No protocol messaging to other chains. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✓ | NFT contracts on Soroban (e.g. OpenZeppelin's NonFungibleToken module); classic one-unit assets with a locked issuer also serve. |
| Demand | 8.1 | average of 7 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 44 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 8.1 | $101,058,686 traded in 24 hours; #25 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $107,425,408) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 7.7 | 1.8% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (±2% of the price ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.1 | $6,989,608 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.14% of its market cap, median of the last 15 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 9.3 | $5.1B, 9.3 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 8.3 | futures, options and margin positions 2.9% of its market cap |
| Wallet support (wallets that hold it, 10 or more: 10) | 6 | 6 wallets in the site's wallet directory |
| Record | 9.7 | average of 3 criteria |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 10 | 12 full years since 2014-08-05, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities) | 9 | 4 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 750 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/stellar/stellar-core); stellar-core v30.0.0 released 2026-10-16 (v29.0.0 2026-10-05). |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Protocol 24, Oct 2025: corrected the ledger-state corruption bug introduced with Protocol 23. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | Protocol 23 Whisk, 3 Sep 2025: parallel Soroban execution and in-memory state. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Protocol 25 X-Ray, 22 Jan 2026: BN254 and Poseidon host functions for zero-knowledge contracts. |
| Conduct (origin, claims, halts) | 10 | 3 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| No halt, freeze or reversal in five years | ✓ | |
Ten sections, weighted equally, each 0 to 10: consensus (the two ladders), supply (the supply scale and a fixed cap that holds), distribution (premine, fundraising, developer share, holders), decentralisation (governance, no central team, who can mint, nodes), security, scalability, privacy, programmability (what the scripting layer can do beyond the whitepaper's payment system), demand, and record (age, development, conduct). They are built from the criteria in the second table: privacy, scalability, security and decentralisation are the Cryptocurrency Standards among them, as follows: privacy (the whitepaper's three checks a base of 7 of 10, three extra features up to 3 more), scalability (four measures and three features), security (pool diversity, network activity, hashrate, clients and two checks) and decentralisation (governance, no central team, who can mint, nodes, holders, premine, fundraising and developer share); programmability (token issuance, smart contracts and five checks) follows them, and supply and demand are two: the supply, scored against 21 million, and demand, the average of seven measures of the market and the wallets. Provisional: parts marked — are not yet measured and are left out of the average. A rating of structure and market depth, not a price forecast or investment advice. How the grade is built · Highest-graded cryptocurrencies.
Federated coins
XRP XRPA
Canton CCA
Pi Network PIB
MobileCoin MOBB
GUNZ GUNB
Obyte GBYTEA
XDB CHAIN XDBAll Federated chains →Proof of Work coins
Bitcoin BTCA+
Zcash ZECA+
Dogecoin DOGEA+
Monero XMRA+
Bitcoin Cash BCHA++
Litecoin LTCA+
Ethereum Classic ETCAAll Proof of Work chains →Supply
35,372,662,517 XLM are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
Launch and allocation
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 100% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 13.4% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
100B lumens were created at genesis in 2014 by the Stellar Development Foundation; the only later issuance was a 1%/yr inflation paid to existing holders via inflation-pool voting (ended 2019), and SDF burned ~55B in Nov 2019, leaving ~50.0B total (CoinGecko total 50,001,786,837; Horizon's total_coins of ~105.4B still counts burned lumens). No open minting has ever existed.
Stripe provided $3M seed funding to the Stellar non-profit at launch (July 2014) and received 2% of the initial lumens (2B). The planned distribution was 50% direct sign-up, 25% non-profits, 20% bitcoin/ripple holders, 5% foundation operations.
Range 4.0-22.8%, midpoint given. Stripe bought 2B lumens for $3M at the 2014 launch (2B / ~50.0B current supply = 4.0%). SDF also funds its operations by selling lumens from its SDF Development (Direct Development) account on exchanges and in direct sales. That account fell from 11,954,850,982 to 2,570,374,111 XLM (SDF mandate page, Oct 2026), a drop of ~9.38B, but SDF publishes no cumulative sales total and part of the drop may be transfers to its 2025 restructured accounts, so (2B + up to 9.38B) / 50.0B gives an upper bound of 22.8%.
No protocol cut. Stellar's only post-genesis issuance was the 1%/yr inflation (2014 to protocol 12, October 2019), paid to whichever accounts holders voted for via their inflation destination; the protocol did not route any of it to SDF or a treasury, and issuance has since ended.
Sources: stellar.org · theblock.co · github.com · stellar.org · techcrunch.com · en.wikipedia.org. Researched 2026-10-24, low confidence.
What a regulator has said
Named a digital commodity in the joint SEC-CFTC interpretation (Mar 17, 2026).
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
How CoinSpectrum ranks Stellar
Stellar is #12 among cryptocurrencies and #19 in the market ranking, which lists wrapped coins, staked derivatives, stablecoins and tokens alongside them. CoinSpectrum counts an asset once, and counts only cryptocurrencies: assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus. A wrapped coin, a staked derivative or a stablecoin is a claim on something already counted; a token, memecoin or otherwise, runs on another chain's blocks. All of them are listed, each in its own section, and none is added to the total. The 7 places between Stellar's two ranks are held by claims and tokens, not by other networks. The methodology sets out the rule and the counting rule argues for it.
The price above is the median of the exchanges the site reads live, checked every minute and cross-checked against a market snapshot (how market data is gathered). The grade is scored on published criteria, each with its source (the method). The site is independent, nothing on it is a paid placement, and its statements are signed (about CoinSpectrum, the manifesto).