Stellar is an open-source network aimed at "creating fair access to the global financial system." Stellar is maintained by the Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit organization established in 2014.
The goal is to build a global financial infrastructure that makes transferring traditional forms of money easy and opens up access to new markets. This is achieved by facilitating transactions of digital representations of currencies (like the US dollar (USD), euro (EUR), Bitcoin (BTC), etc.) on a single financial ledger.
Stellar employs the Stellar Consensus Protocol to achieve network consensus, which is based on the Byzantine Agreement. Stellar provides numerous software development tools and application programming interfaces to make building on and using Stellar as accessible as possible.
The Stellar native token, Lumen (XLM), is used for storage and serves as a payment method for all services offered by the network. #XLM $XLM