Is Stellar (XLM) ready to surpass RIPPLE (XRP)?

As we all know, Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM) share many similarities as both being developed by the same person, Jed McCaleb, the founder of Edonkey.

Ripple was born from a corporation, the OpenCoin, Stellar, in other hand, was born from a non-profit, the Stellar Development Foundation, based on the Ripple Protocol.

Currently, Ripple has countless gateways, including major banks and payments services while Stellar, unfortunately, has a few. But that has less to do with popularity and potential and more with what Stellar seems to be aiming for. They self-describe as a group which connects people to low-cost financial services to fight poverty and develops individual potential. This doesn’t impede them to also be adopted by corporations, like the giant Deloitte and IBM, which announced Stellar will be the backbone if its new “cross-border payment solution” and promised is convening with big banking partners to adhere to it.

Gateways

This is how it works in both systems: anyone can make use of both Stellar’s and Ripple’s API and declare themselves a gateway.

You need to trust the gateways you use, but you don’t need to trust the other participants in the network. This is like trusting your local bank to hold a deposit on your behalf. In Stellar, you explicitly decide how much you’d like to trust a gateway by setting policies such as “I trust this gateway to hold a deposit of up to 100 CAD on my behalf”.

Introducing Stellar

Stellar is a decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money in any pair of currencies. This means users can, for example, send a transaction from their Yen balance and have it arrived in Euros, Yen, or even bitcoin. They’re expecting to support the usual categories of transactions: payments to a merchant, remittances back home, or rent splits with a roommate.

Consensus

Stellar uses its own distributed ledger, which is maintained by a consensus algorithm rather than mining. Each node in the network communicates with a set of other nodes that it believes will not collude (such as nodes run by universities, governments, and companies). Importantly, it doesn’t need to trust the nodes themselves — it just needs to believe the nodes won’t work together to produce the same malicious result. Consensus is then reached by an iterative process, which results in each new ledger being decided upon every few seconds. Correspondingly, transactions confirm nearly instantly, and no mining is needed.

Today

They’re working with a few currency exchanges to help them become the first Stellar gateways; once they’re done, you’ll be able to transact in the currencies they provide. In the long term, there will be gateways to cover every payment method that people choose to support.

So, is Stellar able to surpass Ripple?

Since Stellar is making efforts to be an alternative to traditional monetary transfer using traditional banks, especially in places which most need it, we can’t exactly correlate Ripple’s success to Stellar’s flop, and vice-versa but despite that we can see the potential of Stellar therefore only time will tell us end the rest of the history.

Stellar price momentum continues

With the Stellar price increasing by 13.1% over the past 24 hours, it has become evident there is a genuine demand for this currency. What is exactly fueling this demand, remains to be determined at this point. As of right now, the Stellar price is the second-strongest riser over the past 24 hours.

It is interesting to see how the cryptocurrency markets are evolving while every market is almost on the bubble of seeing major gains, very few of them are actually showing their true potential as of right now.