Stellar (XLM)

The network was built for moving money cheaply across currencies and borders. Any participant can issue an obligation on it — a tokenised dollar, peso or other unit — and the order book written into the protocol matches those obligations against each other, letting one currency be swapped for another in a single settlement, with no chain of correspondent accounts.

Agreement comes not from mining but from voting: each node declares which other nodes it trusts, and the overlap of those lists produces a shared decision. Settlement takes seconds, the fee is negligible, and a small mandatory account balance keeps the ledger from filling with empty entries. A smart contract environment was added later, so logic no longer has to be expressed through built-in operations alone.

XLM pays the fees and acts as the bridge in an exchange. Development, standards and grant programmes are run by a non-profit foundation. It distributes coins through development programmes, and a large part of the original issue was destroyed at one point.

The network's usefulness depends on the intermediaries that take real money in and out: without them a tokenised currency is just a ledger entry.