Stellar Lumens price prediction 2018: is it too late to buy Stellar Lumens?
Stellar Lumens (XLM) is up over 100% in the last week. Can it keep this growth up?
Stellar Lumens has had a massive week, while other big coins such as bitcoin have faced a big holiday slump. Its price is up over 100% since Christmas, and looks to be on a solid trajectory up, at least for the short term.
List of exchanges that allow you to buy Stellar Lumens (XLM)
XLM has some solid tech behind it, and as Bitcoin continues its slump, people are looking for other coins to move their investment to, with XLM one of the most popular.
Why Stellar Lumens could keep growing
It has huge growth without mass public attention yet
If you look at Ripple's growth over the past couple of months, it become pretty clear that most of it was due to the fact that it had an awesome PR run thanks to some great deals it made in Asia and in the USA with American Express.
Stellar on the other hand has barely had a peep come out about it, with the pumping of the price just mostly coming from its community. Once it begins to appear more in the mass public, its potential to grow will be even higher.
All it would take is for a major broker such as Coinbase to pick it up for it to really explode.
It is genuinely good technology
Stellar was actually a fork of Ripple back in 2014, however they now share no common code. It still works in a very similar way to Ripple, allowing for instant transactions across borders across the world. However, the biggest difference is that Ripple is quite centralised still, where Ripple itself determines who may act as a transaction validator on their network.
Stellar on the contrary runs an open ledger, that anyone can access, open and join. The centralised nature of Ripple is something that turns crypto purists off it, as they believe that the biggest advantage of cryptocurrencies is that they are decentralised. Stellar promises a lot of what Ripple can do, but sticks to that core decentralised belief.
Stellar already has some good partnerships
Unlike Ripple who is focused mainly on big banks and institutions, Stellar wants to solve issues in developming markets around managing money and transactions, particularly across different countries. Stellar Lumens already has live payments between Europe and the Philippines, and is looking to add Africa and the Middle East throughout 2018.
How big could Stellar Lumens get?
While it has all the potential in the world, there are two potentially big roadblocks stopping Stellar from reaching bitcoin levels of growth.
Firstly is the fact that it relies too heavily on BTC and ETH, with most exchanges only allowing you to trade Stellar by selling off your other digital currencies. It needs to develop a closer link to USD, as if BTC continues its slump at the moment and XLM doesn't grow fast enough, it could see itself get dragged down with bitcoin.
Secondly, is that its biggest competitor is Ripple. Both of these technologies are looking to do very similar things - they want to become a global payments network. Stellar Lumens is a on-profit foundation, and Ripple is for profit with a big budget behind it to push marketing and major global deals. Stellar is focusing more on the underdeveloped markets, and it will need to hope that it reaches and wins that segment before Ripple gets there.
As for price, it's very likely we could see Stellar hit the $1 mark early in 2018. If it gets picked up by a major broker such as Coinbase and becomes easier to trade for USD, it wouldn't be crazy to think it could then hit the $2-3 mark before the year ends.
List of exchanges that allow you to buy Stellar Lumens (XLM)
