Stellar (XLM) Continues to Shoot Upward

XLM displaced Litecoin, and may be on the way to compete with Cardano in the next bull run.
author by Christine Masters , 25 January
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The Stellar (XLM) rocket is preparing for launch once again. With one successful day, XLM once again rearranged the top 10 on CoinMarketCap, taking the position of Litecoin.

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The most immediate reason behind the price spike is the upcoming roadmap planned for January 25. But adding to the gains is also the improving moods on the markets in general. Trading volumes for Stellar, mostly boosted by the activity on Binance, as well as UpBit, are still not near the record levels, but remain robust. At $0.62, XLM still seems low-priced enough. As XLM becomes more prominent, price growth possibilities are once again opening up.

But XLM may have a long way to go, and in 2018 would have to take a piece of the ICO trend. For now, only Mobius (MOBI) has taken off, and most ICOs still rely on the Ethereum platform. Even bigger platforms like NEO and NEM have few ICOs.

Stellar Aims for the Top

Stellar is one of the projects that goes beyond use as a currency, and instead bets on other use cases, by powering up a network for distributed apps. It seems popularity may do for XLM what it did for Ripple.

However, volatility remains high, and gains are often followed by sharp drops. "Even with the recent downturn, the superficial metrics of Stellar’s performance have risen spectacularly over the last year. Like everyone else in cryptocurrency, we spent 2017 on a rocketship strapped to a missile strapped to an off-brand roman candle made of pure gains," wrote the Stellar team in a recent blog.

The Stellar project is still very much in the development stage, where the team's chief concern is stabilizing the network.

Stellar also performs a drive for developer talent in its Stellar Build Challenge. Presence of developer talent is important and one of the indicators for the success of a project.