Those lumens will enter the public markets over the next few years. Nearly 20 billion lumens are out in the open market, and the Stellar Development Foundation retains the other 30 billion or so to develop and promote Stellar, per its mandate. Now there are about 50 billion lumens, total, in existence, and no more lumens will be created. And in November 2019, the overall lumen supply was reduced. That inflation mechanism was ended by community vote in October 2019. Instead, 100 billion lumens were created when the Stellar network went live, and for the first 5 or so years of Stellar’s existence, the supply of lumens also increased by 1% annually, by design. Unlike the tokens of other blockchains, lumens aren’t mined or awarded by the protocol over time. Because everyone has and needs lumens, lumens can always be a medium of exchange between otherwise illiquid assets. That currency is “the lumen.” As you can see below, there are now over 6.7 million Stellar accounts, and each of them uses lumens to meet minimum balance requirements and pay transactions fees.Ī natural, pleasant, byproduct of having a network token is that it eases the movement of money between users. So we gave the network its own currency, intended solely for denominating network requirements. And, even more, we wanted to create a digital-first asset that embraces the openness of the internet and is independent of economic and political factors. First, we didn’t want the network to “prefer” any particular national currency-if Stellar used dollars, say, then network prices would stay fixed for Americans but float for everyone else. But we felt none of these were appropriate. Since Stellar is a universal system for digital money, we could’ve allowed people to pay these costs in dollars, pesos, yuan or anything else. These are small enough to keep Stellar widely accessible, but big enough to discourage large-scale bad behavior. Right now, the minimum balance is 1 lumen and the minimum per-transaction fee is 0.00001 lumen. Imposing a minimum balance on each account and a very small per-transaction fee were chosen as these deterrent costs. To solve this, we needed to introduce just the slightest bit of friction to deter bad or frivolous actors. These outcomes would defeat the intent behind Stellar: to be a fast, efficient payments system. Without some nominal barrier or cost, the ledger could become filled with spam or nonsense, or used as a kind of arbitrary database system. The need for lumens arose out of the fundamental design of Stellar’s ledger system.
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