The price of Stellar Lumens (XLM) shot up 60% in the past 24 hours and crossed the $0.two marking for the first fourth dimension since Sept. 2018. The "stellar" toll action followed an declaration past the project's developers that a new version of the Stellar public network protocol had been implemented by validators.

The Protocol 15 upgrade was voted into effect at 4:00 pm UTC on November. 23 and introduces two new features that aim to reduce the level of complexity presented to users of Stellar network-based apps and services.

Price action for Stellar Lumens has been relatively subdued over the past year until November. 21, when trading volume started to build. XLM has doubled in cost over the terminal 48 hours and leads the top 100 coins past market cap in weekly gains, topping out at 125%. It is among a a handful of coins currently leading the altcoin pack in what could potentially be a long-awaited "alt flavour."

Initially forked from Ripple Labs protocol by Jed McCaleb and launched in July 2014, Stellar seeks to lessen the cost of cross-edge payments using blockchain. The project is peculiarly focused on serving unbanked or underbanked regions of the world where access to traditional fiscal services is either nonexistent or prohibitively costly.

Stellar'due south Protocol fifteen upgrade includes two new components designed to enhance user feel while retaining a defense against "farm attacks" and other methods in which bad actors may try to subvert the purpose of the network. A farm assault is where multiple accounts are created by an entity with the aim of harvesting the minor amounts of funds sent to those accounts past service providers, which are required to activate the account.

Co-ordinate to Stellar'south official blog, the Protocol fifteen features have been in development for over a year and address some of the "biggest pain points" for developers when building apps and services for customers on Stellar.

"Later on the upgrade, developers can create simpler, meliorate user experiences that abstract away the complexity of blockchain, and do information technology without losing any of the advantages of a fast, inexpensive, and permissionless public ledger."

Stellar has also just appear a partnership with Due east African business organization-to-business payment platform provider ClickPesa, which serves 6 countries in the region. Co-ordinate to Stellar's weblog post, ClickPesa was motivated to use Stellar upon recognizing an "opportunity to reduce the friction inherent to intra-African cross-border payments and P2P payment activity."

In October, Stellar appear that stablecoin USDC would exist hosted on its blockchain at some point in 2021, furthering its mission of simplifying cross-border money transfers. Stellar Lumens' extremely low transaction fees and 4–5 second settlement times are among its peak selling points equally a cryptocurrency.