The Stellar platform is a decentralized protocol that was primarily designed for enabling fast, low-cost, cross-border payments. It is an open source project developed and maintained by the Stellar Foundation. The platform was conceived by Jed McCaleb, who is also the co-founder of Ripple.

Stellar implements transaction-level consensus using FBA, the modified version of PBFT, mentioned earlier. Its native asset is called the lumen (XLM). Owing to its focus on payments, the Stellar platform provides additional modules that work in conjunction with the core software to enable users to build customer-friendly apps that meet compliance and regulatory norms for payments.

Stellar's most interesting feature is probably that it implements a decentralized orderbook as part of its core technology stack. This feature allows you to carry out cross-asset transactions. This way, a customer can initiate a transaction in USD and terminate it in GBP. Since Stellar allows you to issue your own assets, the possible use cases where this feature can be used are endless. You can also use the orderbook to build a trading exchange by submitting buy and sell offers using the Stellar SDK. You can virtually build an entire application around this feature. Many decentralized exchanges have actually done this.

Globally, Stellar has been used by IBM to build the World Wire network to enable cross-border payments. It has also been used by a number of remittance providers across the world who have found the technology stack suitable for building payment applications.