Yesterday my friend Raymond and I went to the Stellar Lumens in Singapore meetup at SUSS. It was a great information and networking session so I wanted to blog some of my thoughts about it.

Stellar is a free, open-source blockchain infrastructure that connects diverse financial institutions (banks, MTOs, and mobile money operators) to deliver low-cost and instant payments globally. In addition, Stellar enables anyone to build innovative and low-cost financial products for their community.

This post is not meant to be an “expert” sort of post–you’ll probably see lots of potentially “silly” questions and thoughts. Rather, it is meant to be a documentation of my own journey with Stellar Lumens ^^ I do PR for companies doing ICOs in Singapore, and while I can represent, strategize and sell well, I do recognise that there are gaps in my tech knowledge.

I’m constantly learning, and please do be patient with me! 🙂

My Relationship With Stellar Lumens / XLM

Let me give a context of why I feel so passionate about XLM.

As a PR practitioner, I first got to know of XLM through KIK (their coin is KIN). KIK basically said last month that they are going to switch from the ETH network to the XLM network. Unsurprisingly, this caused a minor hoo-ha amongst Kin coin buyers. KIK was pretty big in AI last year, so I got to know of XLM not through a crypto news platform, but a fashion retail news platform.

Moving forward, more and more applications are now using XLM as a platform and it’s great news for us coin holders 🙂

Ironically, I only bought XLM when I thought it was going to break past the USD1 mark–at USD0.88. At this point of writing, the market price of XLM on binance is USD0.65 (fml).When the market price of XLM started dropping below USD0.88, I went on reddit to seek solace, and then started reading about the amazing things that XLM can do, which other technologies cannot.

And honestly I know that the price of XLM will shoot beyond USD1 really soon after FairX is up–and also because half-oracle-half-man u/b1tcc says so before he removed his price prediction post on reddit LOL.

XLM Presentation by Lindsay Lin

Here, I’m going to share three pictures on what is so special about XLM:

• I learnt the phrase “fungible” token.
• I also learnt the difference between ethereum and stellar. ETH seems to be better when complex smart contracts are involved, whereas Stellar seems to be better if the project requires speed.
• Open-source is awesome!! 🙂 It is honourable and promotes the vision of a better world for all.

I liked this table a lot, because it clearly outlines the differences amongst ETH, BTC, XRP and XLM. What really caught my attention is that the governance of ripple is for profit, and the governance for stellar is not for profit…

…which honestly suggests to me (I might be mistaken here, feel free to correct) that it might be possible that Stellar has better engineers because there is no unnecessary restrictions imposed due to money.

My next question is then whether banks have control over XLM to the extent that they have control over XRP. The reasoning is simple: if each bank/ financial institution buys USD1 trillion worth of ripple, they can then control the XRP supply to regulate XRP market prices.

Therefore, would there be a possibility that banks do the same to XLM? My logic is that if they were to buy tons and tons of XLM, it would be very unlikely that XLM prices will rise beyond say, $5 by 2018 because banks would want the prices to be controlled. And they can do so via the control of XLM supply.

 And the above is the third USP of Stellar–categorised by consensus mechanism.

Oh I love the above slide.

• MTO = Money Transfer Operator
• Related to micropayment, XLM potentially can benefit a lot of migrant workers. After the talk, a lawyer at the session pointed out to us how costly remittances are–apparently DBS takes 1% of the cost of remittances if a maid were to want to transfer money back to her country?!

That’s totally 杀人放火 >.> So I’m really happy that Stellar can come into this picture and significantly lower the costs.

• I’m really happy about Stellar’s commitment to community efforts for 2018! There’s so much more to learn and to grow this amazing XLM community, and to be honest I’m looking forward to the many amazing things Stellar can do to change the world. I’m really thrilled about the open-source technology in particular.
• The exact 2018 roadmap will be out in Jan 25, and we’ll be seeing FairX news end Jan/ early Feb too. So I hope XLM can finally break the USD$1 mark and rocket!

Lindsay’s Personal Opinion Of Where Crypto Is Heading in 2018

Apologies for the non-sharp picture! I hope you can still make out the words.

Anyway, it seems that fraud will be a really big issue in 2018, and that smart contract auditing is likely to be an issue too. So let’s all buy Quantstamp (QSP) LOL.

Having said that as a PR practitioner i’m really looking foward to greater public acceptance for Stellar and Cryptos in general. Towards 1 Trillion USD market cap before Feb 2018– let’s go! 🙂

General Feel of the XLM Meetup In Singapore

I’m actually feeling quite optimistic after the XLM meetup in Singapore, because I got to understand the XLM technology and Stellar Lumens company culture better. Everyone present seems to be really relaxed and happy about the XLM developments–including some lawyers and brokers I spoke to after the event.

Some of the interesting things I’ve noted at the event is that around 90% of attendees are guys! I was surprised because isn’t investment/ speculation/ understanding of tech or fintech for everyone? So perhaps, from the PR angle, ladies might have the misconception that such “crypto stuff” are “too technical” and not want to attend.

There was also an academic sharing session sharing session after the XLM talk by this lady Wang Yu who’s an academic.

It was very interesting! The basic takeaway from the talk is to “buy TODAY when investors’ sentiments are low, defined as coin having negative or low growth for the past ten days” and “sell TODAY when investors’ sentiments are high, defined as coin having positive or high growth for the past ten days”.

Really fascinating logic, and they showed data and empirical evidence of how the above strategy worked and yielded really high average returns.

Haha last but not least here’s a photo with Lindsay to prove legitimacy ^^

Okay, hope you have enjoyed this update. 🙂 Feel free to leave a comment– would love to hear from you! 🙂