BiUP   Stellar (XLM)

Stellar is an open-source protocol for exchanging money. Servers run a software implementation of the protocol, and use the Internet to connect to and communicate with other Stellar servers, forming a global value exchange network. Each server stores a record of all “accounts” on the network. These records are stored in a database called the “ledger”. Servers propose changes to the ledger by proposing “transactions”, which move accounts from one state to another by spending the account’s balance or changing a property of the account. All of the servers come to agreement on which set of transactions to apply to the current ledger through a process called “consensus”. The consensus process happens at a regular interval, typically every 2 to 4 seconds. This keeps each server’s copy of the ledger in sync and identical.

At launch, Stellar was based on the Ripple protocol. After making several changes to critical consensus code, the Stellar network forked. The Stellar Development Foundation then created an updated version of the protocol with a new consensus algorithm, based on entirely new code.