Stellar is an open-source network with the mission to "create equitable access to the global financial system." The maintenance of Stellar is managed by the Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in 2014.
Its goal is to build a global financial infrastructure that facilitates the transfer of traditional forms of money and access to new markets. This goal is achieved by enabling transactions of digital representations of currencies (such as USD, EUR, BTC, etc.) on a single ledger.
Stellar employs the Stellar Consensus Protocol to achieve network consensus, which is based on Federated Byzantine Agreement. Stellar provides several software development kits (SDKs) and APIs to make developing on Stellar and using it as accessible as possible.
The Stellar token, Lumen (XLM), is used for staking and constitutes the payment method for all the services offered by the system.
