XLM

Stellar · Payments and tokenization L1 (federated SCP consensus, fixed supply)

51 /100

T3Mixed · #16 of 77

Money routeTwo-way ↘low likelihoodReviewed Oct 23, 2026

DemandSoundnessDurability

21 of 4520 of 4010 of 15

Key facts

SupplyFloat 70% of issued supply

Circulating 35.23B, 70%
Locked or unvested 14.77B, 30%
No cap: supply can keep growing, see Supply discipline

FDV / market cap

1.4x

$8.6B / $6.1B

Market cap

$6.1B

Price $0.172, 7d −3.6%

Market data: CoinGecko, Oct 24, 2026. Scores reviewed Oct 23, 2026.

Assessment

Real payment and tokenization rails that the token captures only faintly. Stellar carries ~3.8M transactions a day and about $3B of tokenized real-world assets (SDF, Jun 2026), but those flows settle in USDC and other issued assets; XLM's own claim is a locked fee pool worth ~$0.55M a year and ~$123M of collateral on Blend. Supply is the strong point: nothing minted since 2019 and a slight deflation from locked fees, though reviving inflation needs only a validator-voted protocol upgrade. Soundness otherwise leans on a small committee: the SDF received the whole genesis and still directs ~30% of supply, ten organizations run consensus, and since protocol 26 their vote can freeze accounts, which they used on an exploiter's 45M XLM in Jun 2026.

How value reaches holders

Fee lock only: every transaction fee accrues to the ledger's fee pool, which nothing can spend since protocol 12 disabled the inflation operation in Oct 2019 (CAP-26). The pool grew 2.68M XLM (~$0.55M) in the year to Oct 23, 2026 and holds 10.91M XLM, about 0.02% of supply; CAP-76 (protocol 24) booked XLM lost to the 2025 state-archival bug into the same pool, confirming it as the protocol's burn ledger. No issuance: total_coins has stayed at 105.44B since 2019 (100B genesis plus 5.44B of 2014-2019 inflation), and 55.44B sits in the keyless void account after the SDF's 55B burn in Nov 2019, leaving 50.0B. The SDF directs 14.52B XLM of mandate funds plus a 0.26B upgrade reserve (29.6% of supply), sells XLM on exchanges to fund operations, and sent a net ~3.2B XLM to outside accounts over the trailing year

Score anatomy

Demand

21 / 45: the stronger of two routes, plus adoption

Why would anyone hold it: does value reach the token, and is the network or product used today?

Holder routing engine input

Every fee goes to a fee pool nothing can spend since inflation was disabled in 2019 (CAP-26), so it works as a burn; a validator-voted protocol could release it, so 4, not 5

Plumbing at 50%+, or 100% via contract but governance-revocablemedium confidenceHow this is scored

Revenue reality engine input

The fee pool grew 2.68M XLM from Oct 22, 2025 to Oct 23, 2026 (Horizon), about $0.55M at the period's prices (DefiLlama: $0.53M); at $0.176 the run rate sits on the $0.5M line

$0.5-5M/yr, or undisclosedmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Monetary usage engine input

Blend, a third-party lending market, holds 699M XLM (~$123M, 2% of float) as collateral against ~$39M of USDC borrows (DefiLlama, Oct 23, 2026); payments and RWAs settle in USDC

Measurable niche monetary use: payment rails, savings products, or collateral at third-party venues below the next levelmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Adoption ×3

Stellar carries ~3.8M tx/day and ~$3B of tokenized RWAs; stablecoins and TVL each +77% YoY to $0.41B and $0.23B

Established: a meaningful, steady share of its categorymedium confidenceHow this is scored

Two routes, the stronger counts

Revenue 1, minus 0.5 for routing 4 = cash flow 0.5. Money use 2. The engine is the stronger route: 2.

Soundness

20 / 40

Can a long-term holder trust the rules: supply, float, distribution and control?

Supply discipline ×3

Zero issuance since validators voted inflation out (Protocol 12, Oct 2019): 50B fixed with no mint path, and any change needs a protocol upgrade adopted by validators.

Hard cap or net deflationary by protocol rule, under 1%/yr gross growth, and nobody can mint past the cap or change the schedule short of a hard fork node operators adoptmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Float and unlocks ×1

Float is 70.4% (35.21B of 50.0B issued); the SDF holds 14.78B with no fixed schedule and sent a net ~3.2B XLM to outside accounts in the trailing year, ~0.75% of float a month

0.5-1.5% per month, or large foundation or treasury holdings without a schedulemedium confidenceHow this is scored

Distribution ×2

All 100B genesis XLM went to the SDF in 2014 (95% of the 105.4B ever issued; no public sale, Stripe was repaid a $3M loan in 2B XLM), and the SDF still directs 14.78B, 29.6% of supply

Insiders received over 50%, or one organization directs over 30% todayhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Decentralization and security ×2

Ten tier-1 orgs run consensus and any 4 can halt it; since protocol 26 their vote can freeze accounts, used Jun 17, 2026 on 3 accounts holding ~48M XLM; one client (stellar-core)

A halt, rollback or exploited consensus bug in the last 24 months, attack cost under $10M, or a foundation-selected validator set or small multisig can halt or upgrade with no meaningful exit windowhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Durability

10 / 15

Is it big, proven and reachable by institutions?

Scale ×1

$6.2B market cap (band 4), $148.0M/day median volume (band 4), no flags.

Major: $1-10B market cap and $50M/day+How this is scored

Track record ×1

12 years since Jul 2014 with two 90%+ drawdowns, but the May 15, 2019 halt (67 min) ended only after validators coordinated a quorum change, inside the 10-year window

8-10 years and two such cycleshigh confidenceHow this is scored

Institutional access ×1

Grayscale GXLM is an OTC trust (117M XLM, Jun 30, 2026) and STLR is a $2.0M futures ETF; no US spot ETF or spot ETF filing found as of Oct 23, 2026

OTC trust, non-US product, or a pending US filinghigh confidenceHow this is scored

What would move it up

To reach T2 Strong, 4 gates are still open:

Score 51needs 55(open)
Value engine 2needs 3(open)
Security 1needs 2(open)
Distribution 0needs 1(open)
Adoption 3gate 3(met)
Supply 5gate 2(met)
Float and unlocks 3gate 1(met)
Scale 4gate 3(met)

Tier outlook · next trigger Nov 23, 2026

Two-way ↘low likelihood

Trailing-year fee pool growth vs the $0.5M revenue line (2.68M XLM in the year to Oct 23, 2026, ~7,300 XLM a day)
SDF mandate drawdown (14.52B on Oct 23, 2026; net ~3.2B released in the trailing year) and any escrow or published release schedule
CAP-77 freezes: new frozen accounts or a published validator framework for using them; tier-1 membership (10 orgs) and the 4-org blocking set; the Protocol 30 vote on Nov 23, 2026
A US spot XLM ETF filing or a Grayscale GXLM conversion (access to 3)
Blend XLM collateral (699M XLM) and any venue outside Stellar accepting XLM at scale

Research report

Oct 23, 2026 · source confidence 78%

Stellar is a payments and tokenization network whose consensus is run by a federated set of known organizations. Its rails are in real use: about 3.8 million transactions a day, roughly $440 million of stablecoins and about $3 billion of tokenized assets, but most of that value moves in USDC and other issued assets rather than in XLM. XLM's direct links to that activity are small. Every fee goes into a ledger fee pool that nothing can spend since inflation was switched off in 2019, which works as a burn worth about $0.55 million a year, and about 699 million XLM serves as collateral on the Blend lending market. Supply is fixed: no XLM has been created since 2019, and the total fell to 50 billion after the Stellar Development Foundation burned 55 billion of its own coins. Control is the weaker side. The foundation received the entire genesis supply and still directs about 29.6% of all XLM, releasing roughly 3 billion over the past year. Ten organizations form the top tier of validators, any four of them can halt the network, and since protocol 26 their vote can freeze accounts, a power first used in June 2026 on an exploiter holding 45 million XLM. US access is an over-the-counter trust and a small futures ETF.

Structure (15 facts)

Chain: Stellar L1: Stellar Consensus Protocol (federated Byzantine agreement), ~5.6 s ledgers, protocol 29 on mainnet with stellar-core 30.0.0 released Oct 16, 2026; Protocol 30 (Bell: muxed contract addresses, millisecond close times, ML-DSA host functions) testnet vote Nov 3 and mainnet vote Nov 23, 2026. Soroban smart contracts since 2024
Genesis: Jul 31, 2014: 100B lumens created for the Stellar Development Foundation (nonprofit) to distribute: 50% direct sign-up giveaway, 25% partnership program, 20% free to bitcoin and XRP holders, 5% SDF operations (2017 mandate); SDF repaid a 2014 $3M Stripe loan with 2B lumens and founders were paid in employee grants; no public sale. 1%/yr inflation (paid by holder vote to pools) added 5.44B until protocol 12 disabled it in Oct 2019 (CAP-26). The SDF burned 55B of its own holdings in Nov 2019, retaining a 29.95B mandate
Supply: total_coins 105,443,902,087 (unchanged since 2019); burned (void account GALAXYVOID...) 55,442,115,250; total supply 50,001,786,837; circulating 35,210,795,440 per the SDF supply API (Oct 23, 2026), i.e. total less SDF mandate, upgrade reserve and fee pool
Emission: none: the Inflation operation returns opNOT_SUPPORTED since protocol 12; CAP-26 notes the design 'allows turning on the inflation mechanism in the future if needed', which would take a new protocol version and a tier-1 validator vote
Mint authority: no key or account can create native XLM; only a protocol upgrade voted by the validator set can change issuance
Fee pool: 10,909,894 XLM on Oct 23, 2026, up 2,681,343 XLM since Oct 22, 2025 (Horizon ledger headers sampled every ~2 weeks), ~$0.55M at the period's prices; DefiLlama trailing-year fees $534K, last 30 days $46.4K. CAP-76 (final, protocol 24) added 3.19 XLM of unintentional burns from the 2025 archival bug to the fee pool
Distribution: insider share: the SDF received 100B of the 105.44B ever issued (94.8%). Control: SDF mandate 14,521,195,655 XLM (Development 2.60B, Growth 5.24B, Product and Innovation 3.40B, Assets and Liquidity 3.29B) plus a 258,885,848 XLM upgrade reserve = 29.6% of supply (SDF supply API, Oct 23, 2026). The 2019 mandate aimed to disperse most of the 29.95B within ten years; employees are paid partly in lumen grants
Unlocks: no coded schedule; trailing-year classic payments from the 14 SDF dashboard accounts to non-SDF accounts were 3.41B XLM out and 0.22B in (net ~3.19B, ~9% of float, ~0.75% a month; Horizon, payments only, Soroban transfers not counted)
Security: top tier (Radar, Oct 23, 2026): 10 organizations x 3 validators (SDF, Public Node, LOBSTR, Franklin Templeton, Blockdaemon, Figure, Creit Technologies, Range, MoneyGram, OBSRVR); minimum blocking set 4 organizations, minimum splitting set 3; AWS plus Hetzner hosts form a blocking set; one client (stellar-core, written by the SDF). CAP-77 (protocol 26 Yardstick, final) lets a validator vote freeze accounts, trustlines and contract data: since Jun 17, 2026 three accounts are frozen, including the Blend V2 exploiter (Feb 22, 2026, $10.97M per DefiLlama) holding 45.07M XLM, plus accounts holding 2.50M and 0.50M XLM
Incidents: Sep 3 to Oct 9, 2025: a protocol 23 state-archival bug corrupted 478 Soroban entries; an emergency stellar-core patch quarantined them and protocol 24 (Oct 22, 2025) repaired 394. Last halt May 15, 2019 (67 min), ended by a coordinated quorum change; a 16-hour outage in Sep 2014
Value accrual: fee lock only (all fees to the unspendable fee pool); no staking, no buyback
Usage: ~3.8M transactions and ~7.1M payments a day (30-day average), ~114K active accounts a day, 11.2M accounts (stellar.expert, Oct 2026); stablecoins ~$417M USD plus ~$23M EUR on Stellar (DefiLlama); ~$3B of tokenized RWAs (SDF, Jun 2026); MoneyGram launched MGUSD in Q2 2026. XLM-specific: Blend V2 holds 699.2M XLM (~$123M) supplied vs ~$39.3M USDC borrowed; Stellar DeFi TVL ~$238M
Liquidity: $100M a day of reported volume on a $6.21B market cap (CoinGecko, Oct 23, 2026); price $0.176, down 44% over the year and 80% below the Jan 2018 high of $0.876
Institutional access: Grayscale Stellar Lumens Trust (GXLM, OTC): 117,043,964 XLM on Jun 30, 2026, 1,462,600 shares on Oct 15, 2026 (~121M XLM implied); Volatility Shares STLR futures ETF on Cboe since Apr 1, 2026 with $2.0M of net assets (Oct 22, 2026); no US spot XLM ETF or spot filing found; XLM is one eligible asset of the multi-coin T. Rowe Price Active Crypto ETF (reported)
Roadmap: one protocol upgrade a quarter (SDF Q2 2026 report); Protocol 30 vote Nov 23, 2026; quantum-preparedness plan published Jun 9, 2026

Sources (24)

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How the ranking works and how XLM compares: see the full ranking. This entry as JSON:

GET https://tokens.10102.io/api/v1/tokenomics?symbol=XLM