Stellar follows a payment protocol that works on an open-source mechanism and has a primary goal of enabling easy & quick financial transactions, specifically in the cross-border scenario. Hence the basic functioning is similar to Ripple or other payment protocols, but the distributed ledger alongwith the decentralized servers gets updated every few seconds.

Stellar’s consensus protocol’s unique Federated Byzantine Agreement Algorithm enhances the transaction processing speed, which is efficiently done by the quorum slices. A unique feature in Stellar’s working is the nodes that fulfill the duty of approving the other nodes in the network, and this method ultimately fastens the transaction approval process.

Stellar is a popular open-source payment technology that drastically changed international payment systems by decreasing payment delays. Features of the Stellar network are listed below.

• What makes Stellar the preferred platform by business enterprises is an open-source entity. That means not just a few employees of an organization, but everyone can improve their functional abilities. To keep this procedure secure, multiple nodes keep verifying & entering online transactions in the ledger.
• The mining process is completely avoided in the Stellar network, and on the other hand, the nodes follow the consensus in a few seconds to complete the transaction quickly. By this method, a higher number of transactions can take place at once, and thus the speed and scalability are increased.
• Another advantageous feature is that the Stellar network allows transactions in any currency while the forex exchange process begins automatically.
• It is flexible in the usage of Smart Contracts & multi signatures.

The Stellar technology was officially launched in 2017 and was effectivelyrecognized in partnering with the technology giant IBM. The goal was to cover up to 60% of international payments in the South Pacific countries like Australia, Fiji, etc., by setting up the multi-currency system. This system instigated the linkage between small firms and banks to enhance business transactions by enabling cross-border transactions.

Earlier, the tech company Deloitte has also planned to launch a payment app collaborating with Stellar. More than 30 banks have officially connected their system with the Stellar network for cross-border transactions. The famous payment service provider Stripe has also disconnected itself from bitcoin to join the Stellar platform.

As an open-source payment technology, Stellar works on a distributed ledger in a decentralized network to enable efficient & comfortable international transactions. Here is a brief description of how the payment apps are created on the Stellar network.

1. The first step is to install the SDK as per the technology on which the app will be created.
2. Now connect the installed SDK to the Horizon, which is the API server of Stellar, and it creates a channel between the Stellar core & application.
3. The next step is to create an account on Stellar that stores the funds and manages payments. The public key cryptography with secret seed prepares the security of the account.
4. The various assets such as euros, gold, stocks, bitcoins, etc., are to be created by simply making some payments.
5. The fifth step covers the detailing of transaction fees to be charged and ensuring a minimum account balance.
6. As the sixth step in creating the application, the transactions like sending and receiving are carried out.
7. In the seventh step, the Stellar SDK establishes the payment transactions.
8. Once everything is done successfully, the evidential step is to monitor the configuration and operations of the network for efficient performance.

“Anchors” are units in the Stellar payment system that manage the sending & receiving capacity and work as a link between network and currency. Anchors are trusted methods that work when money is sent to the anchor, and it gets updated to change the actual balance. As the transaction is made, the nodes work to verify the transaction to finish the transaction in a few seconds.

If currency conversion is required during the transaction, it is done through the “orderbook.” The quorums formed on the network serve to interact with the nodes, but in the Stellar network, a common quorum is used to avoid multiple inferences. The Stellar Consensus protocol covers the duty of maintaining safe and trusted transactions, even if error-prone nodes intersect.