Stellar (XLM) Explained: What It Is and How It Trades

What is Stellar? Stellar is a payments-focused layer 1 network whose native token, XLM (the lumen), pays fees and keeps accounts alive. CoinGecko describes it as an open-source network co-founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim, run by the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation (SDF). For a trader the working fact is how XLM moves: over the 90 days to 28 October 2026 its average daily range was 5.34%, twice Bitcoin's 2.73%, and its daily returns tracked XRP (0.83 correlation) more closely than BTC (0.76).

Every number below is computed from dated Binance data or taken from a source we fetched on 29 October 2026.

What is Stellar (XLM) and how does it work

CoinGecko's project description (checked 29 October 2026) lists the pieces:

• Anchors: trusted entities that hold deposits and issue credits on the ledger, the bridge between traditional money and the network.
• Consensus: the Stellar Consensus Protocol, a form of Federated Byzantine Agreement, where each validator picks the nodes it trusts. Stellar's developer docs add that validators earn no monetary reward, and that the protocol favours safety over liveness, so a ledger can stall while nodes agree.
• Built-in exchange and smart contracts: a distributed exchange for trading assets, and the Soroban smart contract platform.

XLM itself has three jobs, per the docs: it pays every transaction fee, it covers the minimum balance (1 XLM per account, with 0.5 XLM for each extra entry such as a trustline), and it funds smart contract rent. The minimum fee is 100 stroops, or 0.00001 XLM, about $0.0000017 at today's price.

We checked the live network through the public Horizon API. Across 200 ledgers (09:56 to 10:13 UTC on 29 October, up to ledger 65,196,604) every ledger closed exactly 5 seconds after the last, with an average of 347 transactions per ledger. The median fee in Horizon's fee stats (its last five ledgers) was the 100-stroop minimum.

XLM has no live page under our markets section yet. XRP does, and it is the better comparison (see our XRP guide).

XLM price analysis: the 90-day fingerprint

We took every 1h XLMUSDT candle on Binance from 31 July to 28 October 2026 (2,160 candles) and averaged the high-to-low range of each UTC hour.

• Average daily range: 5.34%, against 2.73% for Bitcoin and 5.16% for XRP over the same 90 daily candles. The median XLM day was 4.35% (BTC 2.36%). 68 of 90 days (76%) ranged above 3%, 37 (41%) above 5% and 10 (11%) above 10%.
• Busiest hour: 14:00 UTC (17:00 MSK), averaging 1.54% per hour, then 15:00 (1.37%) and 12:00 (1.21%). Without 19 to 22 August, 14:00 is still first at 1.52%.
• Quietest hours: 06:00, 23:00 and 20:00 UTC at 0.82%, 0.87% and 0.88% (09:00, 02:00 and 23:00 MSK). The peak is 1.9 times the quietest hour.
• By session: 13:00 to 21:00 UTC averages 1.15% per hour, against 0.98% for the other 16 hours, and holds 39.7% of the 90-day dollar volume (candle volume times close), against 33.3% if volume were even.

The busy window is the European afternoon into the US open. The trading sessions tool shows it in your time zone; our best time to trade crypto study uses the same method.

By UTC weekday, Thursday was widest at 6.49%, but that leans on 20 August (a 15.1% range): without it Thursday is 5.71% and Monday (6.04%) is first. Sunday was narrowest at 4.20%. Weekend days averaged 4.31% against 5.76% on weekdays (see weekend crypto trading). One tick on Binance is $0.0001, about 0.06% of the price.

The August rally and the other big days

XLM's range is built from a few violent days. On 19 August it opened at $0.1550 and gained 9.9%, then added 6.6% and 11.1% on the next two days to close at $0.2018 on 21 August, 30.2% above the 19 August open. On 22 August it printed a $0.2226 high, a 17.0% range and $60.6 million of volume, 3.7 times its 90-day daily average of $16.2 million, and closed down 3.1%. We attach no news to these days, because we have no dated source for one.

XRP rose 10.4%, 14.7% and 14.7% on 19, 20 and 21 August and 0.5% on the 22nd, while BTC rose 7.1%, 5.3% and 7.3%. The rally has not held: on 28 October XLM closed at $0.1724, 14.6% below the 21 August close. Over the whole 90 days XLM gained 0.2% (opening 31 July at $0.1720), against 22.4% for XRP and 25.6% for BTC. The XLM/XRP price ratio fell 18.1%, from 0.1588 to 0.1300. XLM follows XRP's days, not XRP's trend, and it can break away: on 28 September it rose 7.7% while XRP fell 1.3%.

XLM supply and unlocks

Stellar's own Dashboard API (updated 10:04 UTC on 29 October) gives the full accounting. SDF's lumen supply guide defines each field.

• Created and inflation: 100 billion lumens at launch, plus 5.44 billion from a 1% annual inflation that validators voted to end on 28 October 2019. The Horizon ledger shows 105,443,902,087 XLM ever created.
• Burned: 55.44 billion. On 4 November 2019 SDF sent 55,442,095,285 lumens to a locked address, and the figure counts all lumens sent to accounts with no signers.
• Total supply: 50.00 billion, which matches the Horizon total minus the burn. CoinGecko lists no maximum supply and the same 50.00 billion total.
• Circulating: 35.25 billion (CoinGecko shows the same). Market cap was $5.95 billion (rank 19) and fully diluted value $8.44 billion, 41.9% higher.

The unlock question is the SDF mandate: 14.49 billion XLM (29.0% of total supply, about $2.4 billion at CoinGecko's price) that SDF holds for the network and that "will eventually be spent or distributed", per the guide. The guide's own snapshot for 21 July 2026 showed 15.56 billion. Over the 100 days to 29 October the mandate fell by 1.08 billion (6.9%) and circulating supply rose by 1.08 billion (3.2%, from 34.17 billion). The upgrade reserve (0.26 billion, set aside at the 2015 relaunch for holders of the old network's tokens) and the fee pool (10.9 million, which no one can spend) sit outside circulation.

We found no dated unlock schedule in the sources we fetched, and the numbers cannot tell us whether released lumens were sold. Stellar's lumens page still says "nearly 20 billion" are on the open market; it is undated, so we use the dashboard. For the mechanics, see token unlocks and market cap vs FDV.

Where XLM trades

We read 24-hour spot volume from the public tickers of nine venues on 29 October 2026 at about 10:11 UTC. Coinbase and Kraken quote XLM in USD and report volume in XLM, converted at their own last prices, so those two are approximate.

Binance printed $9.11 million, 30% of the $30.6 million across the nine. OKX followed at $5.16 million and Coinbase at $5.02 million. The two USD books (Coinbase and Kraken) carried 24% of the total. All nine turned over about 0.51% of XLM's market cap in a day. Korean won markets are outside the chart: Upbit's KRW-XLM turned over ₩9.57 billion and Bithumb's ₩2.32 billion (we did not convert them). New listings are tracked on our listings page.

Derivatives are larger than spot. The Binance XLMUSDT perpetual traded $53.8 million in 24 hours, 5.9 times Binance spot, with open interest of 212.5 million XLM (about $35.8 million). Bybit's perpetual turned over $17.4 million with $36.4 million of open interest.

XLM vs XRP and BTC

Over the 90 days, XLM's daily returns correlated 0.83 with XRP's and 0.76 with Bitcoin's (89 daily returns). A regression slope (beta) of 1.38 says a 1% BTC move came with about a 1.38% XLM move, while against XRP it was 0.82. XLM moved in the same direction as XRP on 77 of 89 days (87%) and as BTC on 69 (78%). It beat BTC on 36 days (40%) and XRP on 39 (44%). On the 46 days BTC closed up it averaged +1.52% and XLM +1.85%. On the other 43 days BTC averaged −0.98% and XLM −1.85%, so XLM gave back about 1.9 times BTC's drop but gained only 1.2 times its rise.

The August rally lifts the BTC link more than the XRP link. Without 21 August, the correlations are 0.73 with BTC and 0.81 with XRP; without 19 to 22 August, 0.66 and 0.80. For the benchmark, read the Bitcoin guide and the BTC market page.

The XRP line is the steadier one. It ran between 0.66 (25 October) and 0.93 (4 September) and sat below 0.70 on only 6 of 60 days. The BTC line fell as low as 0.51 on 23 October and was under 0.70 on 30 days. Both lines jump on 28 October (BTC from 0.58 to 0.79) because the 28 September return (XLM +7.7%, BTC −1.2%, XRP −1.3%) left the 30-day window. We do not claim a reason XLM and XRP move together, only that they did.

Reading XLM's structure and key levels

XLM has no live page under our markets section, so we read the BiasNex engine directly at 10:12 UTC (13:12 MSK) on 29 October 2026, with XLM at about $0.1688. On 4h its bias was bullish within a pullback, and the last event was an external bearish break of structure at $0.1717 (the 4h candle from 04:00 UTC on 24 October). On 1h the bias was bearish in a trend, and the last event was an external bearish change of character at $0.1687 (the 1h candle from 01:00 UTC that day). Price sat on that level.

The previous-day levels, from 28 October's candle, are $0.1752 (high) and $0.1687 (low). The engine marks 1h liquidity pools between $0.1735 and $0.1842 above price, and the nearest 4h pools at $0.1780 and $0.1789. The 4h average true range was 1.57% and the 1h 0.83%. Read it against market structure: the 4h bias had not flipped, but the 1h trend was down. These are levels to watch, not a forecast.

Risks

• Range. At 5.34% a day, with ten days above 10%, stops sized from major coins get hit. Size from the stop with the position size calculator.
• Supply overhang. 14.49 billion XLM sit with SDF, and we have no schedule for their release.
• Derivatives. Binance's perpetual alone is 5.9 times its spot volume, so liquidations can move price. The liquidation price calculator shows where yours sits.
• Drawdowns. On daily closes XLM ended 28 October 45.4% below its 29 October 2025 close of $0.3158, the highest in the 365 candles we read. It fell as far as 54.6% below its running peak, to a $0.1435 close on 22 May 2026. CoinGecko's all-time high is $0.8756 (2 January 2018), and the price is 80.7% below it.

More coins in the same format are in the Coin Library.

FAQ

What is Stellar (XLM)? An open-source payments network founded in 2014, run by the Stellar Development Foundation, whose token XLM pays fees and covers account minimums, per CoinGecko and the Stellar docs (29 October 2026). Market cap was $5.95 billion, rank 19.

How much XLM is there? The Stellar Dashboard API showed 50.00 billion XLM in total on 29 October 2026, of which 35.25 billion circulate and 14.49 billion sit in the SDF mandate. No more can be created: inflation ended in 2019.

Does XLM follow XRP or Bitcoin? Both, but XRP more closely. Over 90 days the daily-return correlation was 0.83 with XRP and 0.76 with BTC, and the 30-day correlation with XRP was higher on all 60 days we measured.

When is the most volatile time to trade XLM? In our 90-day data 14:00 UTC (17:00 MSK) had the widest average hourly range, 1.54%, and 06:00 UTC the narrowest, 0.82%.