It’s official: the Stellar network has achieved a major milestone of 1 million active user accounts. This is a great accomplishment for the 3-year-old project trying to establish a new, digital financial system.
Just in July 2018, over 350,000 new accounts were added to the Stellar network. On top of that, over 3,300 Stellar assets with an accumulated value of 48.75 billion XLM (approximately $11.5 billion) have been traded on its blockchain, 8 million trades were conducted, and 25 million payments made.
In comparison, up until August 2017, just 50 million XLM were exchanged on the Stellar chain.
Stellar Progress
Ever since Stellar announced its official partnership with tech giant IBM late 2017, the project has been in the spotlight. The project hasn’t been showing any signs of stage fright, and over the course of the past year it has been making firm steps forward. This could be one of the leading reasons for the explosive growth of the number of active Stellar accounts.
Just recently, Stellar and IBM announced that they are working on a stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar. Stablecoins are often touted as the holy grail of cryptocurrencies because they leverage the benefits of blockchain technology while remaining stable in value based on whichever asset they’re pegged to, a welcome relief to the industry’s volatility. Bringing a stablecoin to Stellar, especially with the the backing of a tech incumbent such as IBM, can become a major catalyst for the Stellar ecosystem, enabling assets to be traded on the basis of a stable unit of account instead of its volatile XLM.
Moreover, the Stellar ecosystem is rapidly expanding, with a large number of interesting projects planning to become part of the network. Tokenizing agricultural land, payment solutions, monetizing on your mobile data, and global carbon credits – you name it and there’s probably a project working on launching the dapp on the Stellar network.
Last June, Stellar spent $500 million in XLM on acquiring the San Francisco-based blockchain company Chain. This company has been working on creating ledger-as-a-service applications based on a cloud blockchain infrastructure, and is a valuable contribution to Stellar in its mission to revolutionize the global payments system.
Concluding Remarks
Achieving 1 million active accounts has been a major accomplishment for the high-reaching Stellar project, but what’s even more interesting is that over 35% of its total active accounts were opened up just last month. What will happen over the course of the next few months as the aforementioned new projects launch?
If this recent boom in activity is organic growth, Stellar blockchain’s scalability might soon be tested.
