Here is what I think, from a fundamental view. Stellar has grown considerably - one of the reasons I got into it when it had a market cap of ~$50MM was because I saw Stripe had backed it ($3MM for 2% of Lumens). I really like Stripe as a payment processor - I use it in my app projects.
Stellar is not just a Ripple clone. Yes, it was forked from the code in early 2014, but they have significant differences. This article explains it pretty well:
https://galactictalk.org/d/242-difference-between-ripple-and-stellar. To summarize, I see two major benefits:
- Stellar is aimed towards individuals (financial literacy, fighting poverty, etc.) vs. Ripple aimed at financial institutions. I'm of the belief digital currency should empower individuals - and there are lots of projects that popped up recently with loosely similar goals (e.g WeTrust - which empowers lending communities - which I've also invested in).
- Stellar has a completely new consensus algorithm (
https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf), which claims to fix a flaw in Ripple consensus. It's hard to say how this secure this algorithm actually is as it's still immature, but there are certainly very smart people working on Stellar (the algorithm was created by a Stanford professor).
On the downside, Stellar seems to have fewer partnerships than Ripple, but as far as I understand it, it's still in pretty active development.
More speculative:
From a technical analysis view, Stellar is extremely undervalued compared to its big brother Ripple (despite the strong growth in the last months). And right now Ripple is experiencing the start of another bullish wave, so investors may look into Stellar as a cheaper alternative.
I invest mostly on fundamentals - if you see my past posts I am usually bullish on coins because of their innovations/fundamentals: Burst, Iconomi, Blocknet, Shift to name a few. Most of these grew significantly since I suggested them.
