Is Stellar a cryptocurrency or software?

Stellar is a software and can be considered as an intermediary between financial products and institutions. This is a platform that connects banks, payment systems and people, allowing you to quickly and reliably transfer money with minimal costs; it is a platform for fast and convenient exchange of not only cryptocurrencies, but also fiat money.

Stellar is an analogue of a decentralized exchange for the purchase/sale or exchange of currencies. Initially, this platform for cryptocurrency transactions was part of the Ripple system and worked on the same protocol until 2015. Later, Stellar separated into an independent project on its own open source protocol. This project has its own cryptocurrency - Stellar Lumens (XLM) - which is, by and large, a certain bridge between other currencies, including fiat, which do not have access to direct markets. 

For example, one party to the transaction wants to receive payment in Canadian dollars, and the second has Bitcoin in his electronic wallet. If it is not possible to find a merchant working with such a currency pair, then, for example, Bitcoin is first converted into Stellar Lumens, and then into the Canadian dollar at a rate that suits both parties.

The Stellar platform operates on the basis of a distributed registry that stores orders (public offers) to buy or sell any currency or digital asset at a pre-approved price. This makes Stellar a single decentralized marketplace for a wide variety of assets.

Today, Stellar offers:

-Money transfers

-Mobile money

-Micropayments

Thanks to the software solution of the Stellar network, users can exchange their assets in the so-called free form. The network refers to a technology that processes financial transactions and is capable of processing up to one and a half thousand payments per second. 

The distributed network consists of servers running Stellar Core software. These servers are maintained by different individuals and organizations. Stellar Core maintains a local copy of the network ledger, transmits and remains in sync with other Stellar Core instances on the network.

A network transaction consists of one or more operations. Payments, offers, and fees are all examples of transactions that can constitute a single transaction.

XLM cannot be mined. All 100 billion coins were issued during the launch of the platform and were immediately distributed among network participants and non-profit organizations.

On the official Stellar website you can purchase your own token - Lumens or XLM, which is successfully traded on the UPbit platform or the Bittrex crypto exchange.. Lumens is a proprietary resource of the Stellar platform, that is, XLM is built into the network.

Future prospects for this project entirely depend on what policy the software developers will pursue. It is obvious that Stellar will not be able to compete with Ripple, which has closely occupied the niche of cooperation with financial organizations, payment systems and banks. Therefore, Stellar can only gain an advantage by occupying the position of a unique system of its kind for exchanging any fiat currency for any digital currency.   In this case, this undoubtedly interesting project has some kind of future.