Despite Brief Network Failure, Stellar XLM Pumps Toward New 2019 High
Stellar Lumens (XLM) experienced a hyper breakout on Thursday mere hours after seeing a sharp correction that may have been tied to unexpected network downtime. At the time of writing, XLM was trading at its highest level of 2019 despite a broad cooldown in the altcoin asset class.
XLM/USD Update
The value of a single Lumen peaked at $0.1575 on Wednesday before undergoing a sharp correction over the next eight hours. After bottoming at $0.1330 early Thursday, XLM swiftly regained 12% of its value and traded just below $0.1500. XLM is presently trading at $0.1442, having gained 16% over the past 24 hours.
Volume has picked up significantly over the past day, with exchange markets processing more than $900 million worth of XLM trades. The bulk of the transactions came via the XLM/USDT trading pair. XLM/KRW also saw significant action on Upbit, one of the largest markets for Stellar.
While Stellar wasn’t the top-performing cryptocurrency on Thursday, it was well ahead of its large-cap peers. With the exception of Ethereum (ETH), most of the majors were trading with moderate gains or losses.
Year-to-date, XLM has returned nearly 28%, according to data provided by CoinMarketCap.
Network Disruption
Stellar’s sharp correction and subsequent bounce may have been tied to unexpected downtime that prevented users from transacting on the platform.
According to Stellar’s validators, the network experienced two hours of downtime on Wednesday, which means no new transactions were added during that period. Tim Swanson of PostOakLabs said that the disruption was caused by several nodes going down.
Breaking: yesterday the Stellar network went down for about 2 hours… only those who run validators noticed it.
no new transactions were added for ~2 hours.
network stats:https://t.co/eSRYFPjDQi
— Tim Swanson (@ofnumbers) May 16, 2019
“[W]hat basically happened was that a critical mass of nodes went down causing a cascading failure,” Swanson tweeted Wednesday. The downtime was barely noticed because so few people use the network, he added.
Stellar’s Quest for Financial Inclusion
Stellar has experienced several hot and cold periods over the past few months, as the ebb and flow between altcoins and bitcoin affected its performance. XLM has lagged some of its large-cap peers in terms of overall performance, but has also benefited from important fundamental news tied to several institutional partnerships with IBM and Wirex.
Investors betting on Stellar believe the protocol can solve one of the biggest issues facing emerging markets: financial inclusion. There are more than two billion people who don’t have access to a traditional bank account. Stellar wants to help fill the void by providing a platform where people can send and receive money almost instantly and at virtually no cost.
IBM has built its World Wire payment platform on top of Stellar’s digital ledger. Today, World Wire supports 47 currencies across 72 countries. Read more – Investing Idea: Stellar.
Disclaimer: The author owns Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. He holds investment positions in the coins, but does not engage in short-term or day-trading.
Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock. Chart via CoinMarketCap.
