What's your opinion on Stellar (XLM)?

[Abiky]

XRP "sister chain" Stellar, has been around with us for a long time. It's often more decentralized than its counterpart. Yet, it's sitting within the top 15 rank in market cap. It's currently valued at $0.36. Meanwhile, Ripple's centralized coin "XRP" sits above $2.70. Stellar Lumens (XLM) should've been worth at least $1 by now. I feel as if this project is undervalued. Probably because of the lack of hype. Everybody is on XRP right now. Is there still hope?

Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[markm]

The Galactic Milieu chose Stellar long ago over Ripple, precisely for the less-big-brother-ish-ness of it.

Ripple basically blew it when they took away the at-home-clients, trying to make everyone use web-based, and maybe even custodial, clients.

It rapidly became apparent that Ripple was aiming to be an IOU platform for banks, institutions, big brother in general, rather than the IOU-platform for everyone where anyone and everyone can freely issue and track and trade personal IOU tokens.

The upshot of having chosen Stellar is of course that long term we might not be able to rely upon "big brother" to provide Lumens with value; long term it might well be up to us, the users of the platform, to see to it the native currency, Stellar Lumens, has-and-retains value.

Fortunately for the Milieu, the whole problem of supplying value to coins and tokens and making that sustainable so that they can actually retain and even gain value has from the outset been a huge huge part of what the Milieu is about.

So it is something we have a lot of experience with.

For the last couple of years we have been running our usual recommended market-making process on the BTC/XLM pair, checking that the strategy does in fact work on such a huge pair.

You can see stats going back to 2012 at https://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html showing how well the Milieu has been doing over many years, but until only a couple of years ago our primary market-making approach was only in use on relatively small trading-pairs, pairs where our scale of operation made a real difference, often pairs in which almost all the buy and sell offers were ours.

Years and years back there were far far fewer trading-pairs "out there", far fewer assets "listed" by "trading venues", so there were a lot more "random passers-by" selling to our buy offers and buying from our sell offers; but over the years with the whole industry becoming more and more diluted, a smaller and smaller percentage of the general population of crypto-interested people being aware of any particular "below the fold" assets, finally we began the experiment of applying our strategy to a major trading-pair, BTC/XLM, that is still so huge compared to the scale at which we are currently still operating that our own columns of buy and sell offers are trivial compared to the huge amount and scale of other people's and other institution's offers, that we really do not yet have much if any impact upon the performance of either side of the pair.

Fortunately it has emerged that our strategy is sound and effective even on such an "out of our league" pair, so now we can realise, from our experience with much smaller pairs in which we are major participants having serious effect upon such markets, that just like with all those smaller markets we must become prepared to someday be as major a player on the huge-scale market(s) in which we participate as we already have for so very long been in smaller markets.

Which is all to say that we recognise it may well end up being up to us to become the primary "support" of XLM's value as measured in bitcoins, and beyond that possibly even to have to hold fiat someday with which to "support" the value of bitcoin itself lest a decline in value of the bitcoins with which we hold up the value of XLM lead to a decline in value of the XLM with which we support the value of all the various coins tokens and assets ultimately supported by our offers to buy them on the Stellar platform using XLM.

The roadmap might not be quite that direct of course, since it is also possible that as we develop the value of all the various Milieu assets more and more of them over time will become of interest to third party exchanges, so that in the long term it might be that more of them than just the current IXCoin and I0Coin on FreiXchange will be tradeable somewhere directly against bitcoin, enabling them to be less reliant on the value of our columns of "offers to buy using XLM" as it becomes possible to build for more and more of them over time columns of "offers to buy using bitcoin"...

TL;DR long term the Milieu is going to become as dedicated to supporting the value of XLM as to others of its assets as well as longer-term possibly having to end up also supporting the value of bitcoin rather than, as has been usual so far, relying upon bitcoin to have value...


-MarkM-


EDIT: Note that depending on how you try to fit the vagaries and irrationalities of "spot markets" into interpreting the Milieu's valuations, it seems very likely the Milieu as a whole has more "market cap" than Stellar does, and furthermore that is actual sitting in treasuries value that, divided by units minted, provides the per unit valuations, which is the opposite of normal market cap's procedure of imagining that just because one unit of a thing can currently sell for X amount some imaginary value known as "market cap", that is basically vaporware, is implied by multiplying that arbitrary X by number of units minted...

[DeathAngel]

I used to hold it many years ago, it hasn't really done as well as I thought. I sold it all in 2017 as it wasn’t doing what I thought it would do. I am unsure on the technicals & utility, I didn’t really care, I just wanted to make big profits. I sold at a profit but nothing worth bragging about.

[passwordnow]

XRP "sister chain" Stellar, has been around with us for a long time. It's often more decentralized than its counterpart. Yet, it's sitting within the top 15 rank in market cap. It's currently valued at $0.36. Meanwhile, Ripple's centralized coin "XRP" sits above $2.70. Stellar Lumens (XLM) should've been worth at least $1 by now. I feel as if this project is undervalued. Probably because of the lack of hype. Everybody is on XRP right now. Is there still hope?

Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I use this for transaction but I think that a time will come that it will be in the spotlight, as of now, the market seems to be favoring those that have some news. If there is no good news with Stellar then there is nothing to expect from it as of the moment. If you've invested on this coin for a long time and you haven't break even yet, it's best to continue holding it because the time will come for it. Maybe not this cycle.

[MAAManda]

XRP "sister chain" Stellar, has been around with us for a long time. It's often more decentralized than its counterpart. Yet, it's sitting within the top 15 rank in market cap. It's currently valued at $0.36. Meanwhile, Ripple's centralized coin "XRP" sits above $2.70. Stellar Lumens (XLM) should've been worth at least $1 by now. I feel as if this project is undervalued. Probably because of the lack of hype. Everybody is on XRP right now. Is there still hope?

Hype is crucial in the crypto industry to gain public attention. I agree that Stellar (XLM) is currently an undervalued asset compared to Ripple (XRP). Economically, Ripple (XRP) has twice the makximum supply of Stellar (XLM). They have an advantage in terms of institutional investment, many institutions support Ripple (XRP), that's why.

[gunhell16]

XRP "sister chain" Stellar, has been around with us for a long time. It's often more decentralized than its counterpart. Yet, it's sitting within the top 15 rank in market cap. It's currently valued at $0.36. Meanwhile, Ripple's centralized coin "XRP" sits above $2.70. Stellar Lumens (XLM) should've been worth at least $1 by now. I feel as if this project is undervalued. Probably because of the lack of hype. Everybody is on XRP right now. Is there still hope?

Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Way back in 2019, I was buying and accumulating that because during those times, Stellar still had good hype. But I can’t really remember why I stopped buying it maybe because they weren’t doing much development under this token anymore.

Even up to now, I haven’t heard of any new updates or developments from them. But I’ll still try to buy again this time and accumulate little by little with the extra money I can set aside
and allocate there. You know how it is in the crypto space — sometimes the ones that seem hopeless suddenly pump one day, and that could possibly happen to XLM, I guess.

[markm]

I wouldn't recommend buy-and-hold really for anything except bitcoin, and in reality even bitcoin I do not simply hold it, I place it as columns of buy offers for other things in case those other things happen to get "dumped" onto my buy offers, whereupon I use the proceeds to build my column of sell offers.

Because even with bitcoin, there seems over time to be a lot of up-and-down action even if long term the trend is always upward, so rather than simply passively waiting for some final end-point of up that one might end up missing even if it does happen, I am passively waiting for any up or down sufficient to start chewing into my buy or sell offers, the proceeds of which fuel my column of offers on the other side of the order-book.

So even if there turns out not to be any up for an extended period, the chewing down into my buys column stocks me up more and more ready for any eventual upturn and any upwards moves fuel my column of buy offers ready to gobble up lots of the sell-side asset cheaper and cheaper and cheaper all the way down.

The main possibility of supposed "loss" this way is times when both sides of the pair are going downward, which if you have chosen your assets well you can choose to regard not so much as your assets going down as whatever they are going down with respect to rising, which is actually an amusing thought when it happens to be fiat that is, seen thus relatively, "rising" since we all know fiat is not something one ought ever expect to rise in a real sense at all.

Especially with the above the "market-cap fold" assets so many folk here keep suggesting, I definitely think one is most likely to do better with such a market-making style of trading that benefits whichever direction a chosen pair leans toward than by simply holding one of them and hoping its subsequent movement is only upward. Large upward movements tend to include lots of little backtracks along the way, so as it zig-zags upward you can gain a lot on the up and down dithering making your ultimate gain from the rise larger, and if it goes down well that is the other side of the pair going up, at least relatively, so you can gain in both assets thus even if both "go down" compared to whatever else (even fiat) you can be having more and more of both which can make up for a lot of the down-ness and of course down compared to fiat is probably a temporary situation anyway unless your original entry into the pair was via an asset that was not already at the time at a low point aka a good entry-point...


-MarkM-

[rat03gopoh]

I am unsure on the technicals & utility, I didn’t really care,

There's not much difference compared to Ripple, but Stellar's network fees are very competitive, even compare to newer coins that claim to be very cheap. If you're used to sending money between exchanges, XLM is very affordable and is listed on almost all major and local exchanges. However, I recommend it only for small transfers, as order spreads seem too high on almost all exchanges. I personally rarely use limit orders for trading.

[Odohu]

XRP "sister chain" Stellar, has been around with us for a long time. It's often more decentralized than its counterpart. Yet, it's sitting within the top 15 rank in market cap. It's currently valued at $0.36. Meanwhile, Ripple's centralized coin "XRP" sits above $2.70. Stellar Lumens (XLM) should've been worth at least $1 by now. I feel as if this project is undervalued. Probably because of the lack of hype. Everybody is on XRP right now. Is there still hope?

Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I agree with you that Stellar is undervalued but with time I believe great things will happen to it. In terms of rising in price compared to XRP, the later have done far better than the former probably because of the many possible news that XRP enjoyed. You know that the industry depend so much on news so when Ripple won their court case, it was a big boost since it drew the attention of people to it. If I have extra cash to invest in altcoins, XLM will definitely be among my first choice.

[markm]

There's not much difference compared to Ripple, but Stellar's network fees are very competitive, even compare to newer coins that claim to be very cheap. If you're used to sending money between exchanges, XLM is very affordable and is listed on almost all major and local exchanges. However, I recommend it only for small transfers, as order spreads seem too high on almost all exchanges. I personally rarely use limit orders for trading.

The thing about limit orders compared to market orders is that using market orders makes you basically part of the "pump and dump" masses.

It is of course necessary that there be folk who buy from the sell offers and folk who sell to the buy offers, but those are technically "takers" rather than "makers" of the market.

It is inefficient, but your inefficiency fuels the "makers" so it does serve a purpose in the market, it is like "convenience stores" versus the larger chain stores and box stores, you pay a premium for the convenience of taking an existing offer instead of placing an offer of your own and waiting for someone else to "take" it.

Intrinsically though taking from the sell offers is pumping and selling to the buy offers is dumping, so your convenience is, in the mass, a component of a larger scheme of things "pump and dump".

Your individual pumps and dumps might all alone be somewhat insignificant each looked at by itself, and as I mentioned ultimately the profits you thereby provide to the "makers" is beneficial to the extent it encourages folk to "make" the markets, but if you keep in mind that it is nonetheless a case of doing little pumps as your buying and little dumps as your selling maybe that will either cause you to think the whole phenomenon of "pump-and-dumps" is fine and dandy or to think a little each time you go to buy or sell about the effect your choice of limit order or market order could have in the aggregate as potentially many many other people face the same choice...


-MarkM-

[rat03gopoh]

It is inefficient, but your inefficiency fuels the "makers" so it does serve a purpose in the market, it is like "convenience stores" versus the larger chain stores and box stores,

In all market situations, XLM price volatility tends to be constant, and the price spread remains. I used to frequently set limits, and most of them went unfilled. Instead of being executed at the actual price based on the aggregator, I had to wait for a higher/lower price due to the price spread. So, I eventually stopped hoping for a slightly higher price, say, just to cover withdrawal fees.

[markm]

It is interesting that you mention constant volatility, because trading feeds upon volatility; and when trading large spreads can be good too.

When one of the exchanges I use to convert bitcoin or stellar into Canadian dollars stopped offering XLM/CAD so that there I had to use my XLM to buy BTC then sell the BTC for CAD (as they still do offer BTC/CAD and also BTC/XLM) I noticed how volatile their BTC/CAD was and thus realised that rather than merely selling my XLM for BTC and cashing out the BTC I would do better (and have done wonderfully better in fact) by doing my market-maker-style trading strategy on the BTC/XLM pair that I already knew from many many years of success worked really well in pairs where I was the main market-maker. It was thus I learned that the strategy is also extremely good even on pairs where I am a relatively trivial participant.

So it might be worth your while to consider whether some pair versus XLM might be worth your while to do such trading on to provide a long term influx of XLM that from time to time you can draw upon to begin operations on yet another trading-venue, since you already find XLM useful for initial funding of your operations on new venues...

No matter how much fiat income you have coming in from the fiat side of things, such trading can some day end up a greater income-source than whatever you do on the fiat side, so you could maybe eventually end up like I have, a denizen of crypto, with crypto as primary income source; and if you continue to earn on the fiat side too you might even end up hardly needing to buy fiat anymore with crypto if your fiat-side income mostly suffices for whatever needs you have that demand fiat...


-MarkM-

[mich]

Well XLM was a project that I did used to hodl. But I now have sold all of it because I do think there is better projects out now.
It was a coin I did buy because I liked how it was going to be used for cross-border payments. It did have alot of partnerships but I do not think alot came from that.
When I did not make alot of profit I did sell all of them. I think I did buy Ethereum with my gains from selling them.

[Abiky]

I used to hold it many years ago, it hasn't really done as well as I thought. I sold it all in 2017 as it wasn’t doing what I thought it would do. I am unsure on the technicals & utility, I didn’t really care, I just wanted to make big profits. I sold at a profit but nothing worth bragging about.

Back then, Stellar used to have an "inflation destination" feature. Basically, you could "claim" inflation by setting your own address. Instead of having XLM burnt on the network, they were passed on to holders (similar to a PoS coins). Unfortunately, developers removed this feature, leaving us with no incentives on the Blockchain.

At least, Stellar is much better alternative than Ripple's XRP. I've read a long time ago that the developer team was planning on integrating the Lightning Network into Stellar. Not sure if the solution is already implemented. It could've made XLM faster and even cheaper to use. There are a few DEXs and "De-Fi" apps built on Stellar. The Soroban upgrade (which enabled smart contract features) made this possible. Maybe someday XLM will "kill" XRP? One can only hope...

[markm]

Stellar is itself a "DEX" using the loose meaning of the term which it seems maybe the majority of so-called DEXes use.

That is to say it decentralises trading not by using atomic swaps between blockchains but, rather, by allowing anyone to issue IOUs (tokens) representing anything, and anyone to choose how many of which token(s) of whose to "trust" (accept).

So for example instead of having atomic swaps between a canadian dollars chain and a U.S. dollars chain and a Chinese whatever chain and so on it lets you choose whose CAD tokens you trust how many of, whose USD tokens you trust how many of, whose Chinese-currency tokens you trust how many of and so on, and has atomic multi-step trades between such tokens.

So you can do things like "get me USD for my Chinese whatevers" and it will find you a route, even through intermediary tokens you do not trust, to atomically get you what you want for what you have.

So as well as allowing a bunch of friends Tom Dick and Harry to each trust one-another for some number of bucks or loonies or beers or whatever they want to label their tokens, it also allows them to set up buy and sell offers to and from their tokens to other people's tokens to "ripple" liquidity across a wider network of contacts, so someone wanting to buy some CAD with some USD at a moment when Tom Dick and/or Harry happen to be offering good prices across some routes through the network could end up buying some of Tom's bucks for some of Dick's loonies with which to buy some of Harry's CAD with which to buy their own local trusted bank's CAD, all in one atomic transaction...

It also has built in "automatic market maker" ability which is basically a liquidity-pool ability, and a free open-source bot, Kelp, that I have found quite useful for many years now so much that I use it instead of the automatic market maker built-in.

That rippling effect can also result in arbitrageur bots that seem to be ever active there to notice that according to your prices for some things they can make a bit of Lumen buying one of your tokens with lumens, using it to buy another of your tokens they can sell for more Lumens than they started with, so there is also some automatic balancing across your tokens, something you will want to be aware of if you, like the Galactic Milieu, deploy a number of different tokens...

(It means for example the Canucks, Brits, Ixians, I0nians and so on can all offer to buy the other civilisations' tokens at half computed-value or less so if any of them get dumped too low the others will start picking up those bargains using their own tokens, with the Lumen-oriented arbitrage bots that seem always active on Stellar automatically routing through those offers to make all the various Milieu currencies interact with one-another...)


-MarkM-

[JamesDaniel90]

There is still hope for XLM, but as it is already a $12b market cap I just feel there are better plays out there that will see better returns.

I do think it can 5x from current price this coming altseason though so if that's good enough for you then go for it.

[MArsland]

I haven't much attention to XLM for a long time. This coin is still surviving in the market, but it seems that investors and traders are avoiding pumping this coin. Perhaps this is because its technology is no longer relevant and there has been a massive migration to new narratives such as RWA, AI, and ZK.
Nowadays, the narrative in crypto changes quickly, and when old coins remain stagnant without any technological revolution, they can lose their appeal in the market. That is why XLM is no longer very attractive.

[Abiky]

Stellar is itself a "DEX" using the loose meaning of the term which it seems maybe the majority of so-called DEXes use.

That is to say it decentralises trading not by using atomic swaps between blockchains but, rather, by allowing anyone to issue IOUs (tokens) representing anything, and anyone to choose how many of which token(s) of whose to "trust" (accept).

So for example instead of having atomic swaps between a canadian dollars chain and a U.S. dollars chain and a Chinese whatever chain and so on it lets you choose whose CAD tokens you trust how many of, whose USD tokens you trust how many of, whose Chinese-currency tokens you trust how many of and so on, and has atomic multi-step trades between such tokens.

So you can do things like "get me USD for my Chinese whatevers" and it will find you a route, even through intermediary tokens you do not trust, to atomically get you what you want for what you have.

So as well as allowing a bunch of friends Tom Dick and Harry to each trust one-another for some number of bucks or loonies or beers or whatever they want to label their tokens, it also allows them to set up buy and sell offers to and from their tokens to other people's tokens to "ripple" liquidity across a wider network of contacts, so someone wanting to buy some CAD with some USD at a moment when Tom Dick and/or Harry happen to be offering good prices across some routes through the network could end up buying some of Tom's bucks for some of Dick's loonies with which to buy some of Harry's CAD with which to buy their own local trusted bank's CAD, all in one atomic transaction...

It also has built in "automatic market maker" ability which is basically a liquidity-pool ability, and a free open-source bot, Kelp, that I have found quite useful for many years now so much that I use it instead of the automatic market maker built-in.

That rippling effect can also result in arbitrageur bots that seem to be ever active there to notice that according to your prices for some things they can make a bit of Lumen buying one of your tokens with lumens, using it to buy another of your tokens they can sell for more Lumens than they started with, so there is also some automatic balancing across your tokens, something you will want to be aware of if you, like the Galactic Milieu, deploy a number of different tokens...

(It means for example the Canucks, Brits, Ixians, I0nians and so on can all offer to buy the other civilisations' tokens at half computed-value or less so if any of them get dumped too low the others will start picking up those bargains using their own tokens, with the Lumen-oriented arbitrage bots that seem always active on Stellar automatically routing through those offers to make all the various Milieu currencies interact with one-another...)


-MarkM-

Ripple's XRP works the same way. Basically, anyone can issue tokens that represent anything. XRP is like a payment gateway for near-instant, and cheap transfers in within any denominated currency. The only difference is that XRP is centralized, while Stellar (XLM) is decentralized.

I see Stellar with a lot of potential, now that smart contracts have been implemented on the blockchain. It's quite undervalued (less than $1), considering that XRP is worth $3.04 right now. The only way it can take off, is if someone with a lot of influence in the crypto space promotes it. Another Elon Musk will definitely drive XLM all the way to the moon. At least, Stellar does the job it's supposed to. I hope it lasts for a very long time.

[markm]

I suppose for people who want a buy once, sell once investment experience it makes some sense to go with things hoped or expected to seriously skyrocket.

JamesDaniel90's idea that a five times the price increase is possibly not worth his time to bother with might even be right for such a preference.

But last year it was in the USD$0.08 to USD$0.11 range, then it went to USD$0.55 or so and lately is back to USD$0.35 to $USD$0.45 or so range so to me is already up at four or five times what it was a year or so ago meaning another five times will put me up 20 to 25 times, and that is all incidental to the fact it is not an investment in itself just a means to the end of trading the Galactic Milieu assets, the values of which I would actually prefer to see properly shown in terms of the platform's base currency XLM because currently if XLM goes down in dollars more than a Milieu asset goes up in Lumens the display-in-Lumens will shown the asset as down, which while true in dollars can be far from true in Lumens, which is what is important to me on the Lumens-based platform.

If I were to also run all those assets on the Ripple platform, which I still think could be extremely risky until massive overhead costs in lawyers fees and so on have been incurred exploring whether doing so would even be "permitted" "at scale",  probably trying to get Ripple to properly display XRP-based value up and down percentages would be similarly awkward so probably wouldn't even clearly indicate to me whether Ripplers are seeing more or less profit in the Milieu assets than Lumenaries see relative to their own "native" currency.

Dollars are far from stable and are not native to even half the planet's population so to me it would make much more sense to see native-currency display of loss and gain, for starters right off the bat it would make it far easier to see how constantly, and how much, dollars are down compared to I suspect most things other than fiat, memes, and shitcoins.

Possibly nowadays Ripple might be as simple cheap easy and convenient to use as Stellar, but I worry that the difference between Ripple and Stellar is to a large extent not a mere happenstance of being centralised but more the implications of seemingly being deliberately intentionally not merely centralised but also lodged in the tradition of moat-building whereby building jurisdictional as well as economies-of-scale "moats" around one's financial-interests is considered normal and expected; that in effect Ripple basically aims specifically to eliminate small and grass-roots movements to enable the "big boys" to trample all over them all...


-MarkM-