STR - Stellar Lumens (XLM)

Hi Folks,

Back again today for my 2nd post. Yesterday I posted How to Buy Crypto Currency In Australia – A beginners guide And today I wanted to touch a little on my starting strategy for entering the Crypto market.

As mentioned in my previous blog post my starting strategy with my crypto portfolio is much like a great BBQ Pitmasters strategy – Low and Slow. This strategy is not by choice either but due to myself having a lack of funds to really enter the market in a big way. As like a lot of people I have a mortgage and bills to pay, work a full time job and have a little left over each week. Rather than keep this little bit over each week in a bank account I figured I would put it to work in the crypto market. I missed the boat first time around with Bitcoin so wanted to get a start on building my Crypto portfolio while there is still huge opportunity.

As I have set up my account via the Coinspot Exchange in Australia and they are relatively new so only just starting to build up a number of coin offerings I done my research on what was available via this exchange. Prior to this I had already read up on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and litecoin but the higher price of these coins and my small investment didn’t seem the right fit. I seen Stellar at less than $0.05 AUD so decided to take a closer look at them.

First thing was to check their charts, whilst the price seemed good at less than $0.05 AUD this would mean nothing if it was at an all time high due to a pump and dump. The key things I wanted to see here were:

• What was the all time lowest and highest price?
• When it dropped from the highest price at what point did start to gain traction back and was there a pattern emerging here e.g every time it goes up does it drop back down to the same point before going higher?

From the charts provided I was able to see that the $0.05 AUD was about half of it’s all time high price and generally at the price where it started to rebound in the past – all good signs.

So from a price point we were looking good but who was behind Stellar? I found out that their platform was based on that of Ripple and that a few of the developers on the Stellar project had actually been some of the founding members of Ripple (XRP). One of the founding members had also been the founding member of the Mt Gox exchange also. This did have some concerns for me and if you are unaware of the Mt Gox incident I strongly suggest you look into this as a lesson on how to keep your Crypto safe. Thankfully though this member had left Mt Gox well before the incident. The further I looked into Stellar the more I got the feeling of a kind of competitiveness between Ripple and Stellar communities which I seen as a positive especially if this is used to drive innovation.

What was Stellar all about and does it have real world use? As per their website (link at bottom of article) ‘Stellar is Open-Source, Distributed Payments Infrastructure. It connects people, payment systems and banks’. In a nutshell it is a low cost way to move your money quickly and reliably. So it has real world use which is a winner but to top it off the humanitarian in me also appreciated the fact that they are a non profit who are looking for solutions to assist under developed countries, so has a feel good factor too.

Here is where my interest really started to pick up. Stellar have partnered with IBM and KlickEx to assist developing a blockchain cross border payment solution that is low cost and efficient and to top it off this was all happening in my Area of the world. Further to this IBM have signed a heap of partnerships since my initial investment with VISA and other partners to assist in their development of blockchain and the benefits it can provide them. Whilst Stellar wasn’t specifically mentioned in the Visa announcement it is nice to see that there is potential there for them to be involved.

The Stellar website looked professional and easy to use, My searches on reddit and other online forums showed a highly active community and there appeared to be regular updates from the developers. The development team are involved in a number of upcoming conferences and seminars and seem to be quite active in this area which are all good signs. Another positive sign recently was that Stellar Lumens now has added support on Nano Ledger S which is a good signal that it is now being recognised more in the mainstream.

At the time of writing this piece the Stellar price has risen above it’s all time high and is currently over $0.11 AUD so good signs early. I wouldn’t read too much into this as all Crypto’s seem to be quite high at the moment so I will wait for a slight market correction before investing further. As always do your due diligence and good luck!

https://www.coinspot.com.au?affiliate=NHEHW
https://www.stellar.org/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/new/
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53290.wss
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/11/gox-bitcoin-exchange-mark-karpeles-on-trial-japan-embezzlement-loss-of-millions

Also any upvotes, resteem or comments are very much appreciated and definitely welcomed

N.B – Any opinion or view in this article is expressly my own. I have no formal qualifications in regard to Journalism, investing or programming. I am not a representative of any company mentioned in this article and it has been written to aid you in starting your Crypto journey as well as the hope of assisting myself in gaining additional affiliates through the Coinspot exchange.