Stellar Overview Course

Stellar makes sending money as easy as email. It provides a way for people and financial institutions like banks, remittance companies, and mobile payment apps to send payments between each other in any asset quickly and at almost no cost.

In the Stellar ecosystem, nodes store the global ledger and together make up the Stellar network.

The Stellar network can be used to hold, transfer, and trade any type of asset. Using Stellar, there’s no need to create a custom, error-prone smart contract to issue an asset. Instead, the concept of an asset is built into the open source software that powers the Stellar network. This makes the process of issuing assets on the Stellar network more secure and much easier.

As a user, you interact with the Stellar network through accounts. Accounts are saved in the global ledger. Everything else in the ledger - assets, trades, trustlines, etc. - are owned by a particular account.

Cross-border and cross-asset payments are powered by Stellar's decentralized exchange with on-ledger order books and atomic swaps of up to 6 hops.

In this video, we explore the Stellar Consensus Protocol, or Federated Byzantine Agreement, and compare it to Proof of Work and Byzantine Fault Tolerance.