Last year Stellar Lumens was the golden child of crypto, a Ripple rivaling financial transfer blockchain that promised great things. Its slogan of ‘money moving like email’ is exactly what the world needs right now yet the token has failed to gain much traction in terms of price as XLM has continued to slide down the chart while its market cap erodes.
XLM Almost Out of The Top Ten
Stellar has suffered greater losses at the paws of the bears than those around it. A couple of months ago challenging for the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, XLM has now dumped to ninth being surpassed by Tether, Litecoin and Tron. At the time of writing it is the worst performing altcoin in the top thirty losing another 3% on the day.
Since its all-time high XLM has been smashed over 90% to its current price of $0.083 (2400 satoshis) which is the lowest it has been for 15 months. Granted, Cardano has fared worse but the slide of Stellar down the market cap chart should be a concern.
The centralized Ripple token, XRP, from which Stellar was originally created, has fared much better taking and holding the second spot in terms of market cap, however it has seen similar losses since ATH.
Stellar Development Foundation Soldiers On
The team, like many others in the crypto sphere, has paid less attention to prices and more on the product which involves actively increasing adoption channels. One of these is AnchorUSD which, according to the January newsletter, is “the first totally seamless integration that allows any Stellar application to provide USD deposit and withdrawal directly from their users’ bank accounts.” Additionally SatoshiPay has launched three new full Stellar validators and a new multi-signature wallet.
Earlier this month Grayscale Investments added Lumens support to its platform according to Fortune. Its newly launched Stellar Lumens Trust is Grayscale’s ninth crypto product; others include funds for Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP. AlphaPoint’s network of over 100 exchanges also announced support for Stella last month.
Unlike other crypto firms such as ConsenSys, Blockfolio, Bitmain and Huobi, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has continued to hire during the bear market taking on software developers and partnership directors.
There have also been key updates to the platform with Stellar Core 10.1.0 and Horizon 0.15.4 released in addition to Interstellar exchange releasing version 3.5 of the application with a raft of new features. Several other project updates and upcoming events are also scheduled for the coming weeks so to say this team has been busy would be an understatement.
There is no obvious reason why Stellar has dropped so far down so quickly, the foundation has been getting their heads down and developing the project so maybe it is time to ignore the prices and focus on the products for Stellar and all crypto assets.
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