3 REASONS WHY STELLAR LUMENS COULD BE THE BEST INVESTMENT OF 2018 | YOU NEED TO READ THIS!

I’ve got no problem saying it, Stellar lumens is without a doubt one of my favourite cryptocurrencies out there. But why? Well I’m going to give you 3 reasons why I think stellar lumens could be the best investment of 2018, or at least one of the best. But before that, let’s have a super quick look at what stellar lumens is.

WHAT IS STELAR LUMENS (XLM)
Stellar is an open-source, distributed payment infrastructure and blockchain protocol created by the Stellar foundation, which is a non-for-profit organisation. If you didn’t quite catch that, in simpler terms, stellar is a payment network like Visa or PayPal, but its decentralised and more advanced in so many ways.

Stellar was originally forked from Ripple project, another payment infrastructure which uses blockchain, whilst being centralised like PayPal. This was because the head of stellar Jed Mccaleb, was a co-founder of the ripple project. Mccaleb and the stellar team decided later on to give the code a re-haul and now it is a project which is quite different in both its technology and its goals.

The short and sweet of the stellar platform is that it allows a person to send currency to anyone, anytime and to any place in the world. When sending these transactions, there is a tiny fee, but they are only around 1/1000c per transaction so nothing to lose sleep over. The transactions are processed in around 3-5 seconds, making them basically instant and the platform, when at full use, can support around 1000 transactions per second.

Now, let’s get onto the reasons why I think stellar lumens will have a good 2018.

DEMAND
Stellar is focusing much of its efforts on delivering payment solutions to those who live in countries where people do not have access to banks and other financial services. Due to this, many people have dubbed it “The coin for the people”. As you can see from the figure below, the 1st world is a very small one if we are talking about number of countries. The 2nd and 3rd world forms the majority of our earth today.

Now as you can see in the picture below, everywhere in the 2nd and 3rd world, the majority of people are considered “Unbanked” i.e. do not have access to or do not use financial services like we have here in the western world.

This factor creates a huge demand for something like the stellar project. Imagine if just one of these regions started using a single, decentralised platform like stellar, the ramifications would be extremely positive for all the people who have a stake in it. Now if Stellar could create a network which was utilised all over the world, the theoretical returns for early investors like ourselves would be explosive to say the least.

POTENTIAL TO CREATE HUGE CHANGE
My 2nd reason why stellar is such a huge deal relates back to the first point in a way. Unlike most other blockchain projects out there, Stellar is focusing much of its efforts on the developing world. The introduction and advancement of technology over the past 100 years has made things better for those who live in the developing world, but only to an extent. These people still struggle more than westerners in all aspect of daily life, and the lack of technical and financial infrastructure means that it is very hard for them to move forward and/or achieve success.

Imagine this. A farmer living on a small island in Polynesia can only grow a small amount of produce, because the only customers he has is within his local vicinity, or at the very most on neighbouring islands. If an infrastructure such as stellar was introduced, this man would be able to contact and trade with buyers anywhere in the world, e.g. Indonesia or Australia or china. This would enable him to efficiently scale his business, helping him, his family, his local community and the overall nation which he is supporting.

There also may be products which are only grown/produced in certain areas, or the farmers may live in a viable location for off-season farming. If the only viable way to do trade with a large retailer e.g. Woolworths in Australia, that buyer will have to start using that infrastructure. This may also be a marketing tool for retailers in a society which is beginning to make ethically focused purchase decisions. This would introduce volumes of fiat money and into the network and would subsequently raise the price of the XLM token.

When preaching to people about how Blockchain could change the world, we never really have any great examples. This is one example in which blockchain could change the world.

POWERFUL PARTNERSHIPS:
If you have done some research into Stellar or have been in the crypto space for a while now, you would know that one of their greatest strengths is the partnerships they have already secured. If you look on their website you can see that they have many corporate donors including companies such as Stripe, Blackrock and Google. These are all big companies with some big influence in their respective markets and too see such interest from these companies so early on is a hugely positive sign. The most notable partnership that Stellar has secured is one with IBM. There was much hype around this in the later part of last year but after the announcement hype wore off, people began to wonder whether this partnership is all it’s cracked up to be.

In more recent times, there was an AMA held with Jesse Lund, the head of Blockchain and Financial services at IBM. A lot was said during this interview but here is the short and sweet of it. First off, IBM have already setup a network using the stellar lumens platform in the oceanic region e.g. south-east Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia and Australia. So the fact that a company like this are already using a blockchain project for something like this is insane. Lund also mentioned that Stellar Lumens is an “integral part” of IBM’s future and that they have no intention of creating their own cryptocurrency. The most speculative and potentially the most important part of this interview was the fact that Lund Hinted that the Central banks are “very very close” to issuing digital currency, and there is a good chance it will be on the Stellar network first. This is not to be taken lightly as IBM has done a lot of work with the central banks in the past.

So that’s basically it. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post! If you haven’t already I would appreciate if you could upvote and Re-Steem this blog and subscribe to my YouTube channel for more cryptocurrency related content. Have a nice day :)