Every transaction on Stellar costs a fee, paid in XLM. The purpose is to stop the network being flooded with meaningless transactions, and the fee is deliberately tiny, a fraction of a cent, because the network exists to move payments cheaply.

XLM has a second use that matters more than the fee. Stellar is built to move any currency, not just its own, so a payment from pesos to euros routes through whatever path is cheapest. XLM can act as that bridge when no direct market exists between two currencies. Every account also has to hold a small minimum balance in XLM to exist on the network at all.

Both of these are real reasons for the token to exist that have nothing to do with anyone expecting its price to rise. It is consumed by use, it is the reserve every account must hold, and it is the bridge asset between currency pairs that have no market of their own.

Over the trailing year, people paid $621,442 in fees to use Stellar. That figure is measured with complete daily data covering every day of the year.

Set against the network's size, it is among the smallest of any project covered here. A year of fees comes to 0.0055% of the total value of all XLM in existence, about one part in eighteen thousand. An app store typically takes fifteen to thirty percent of what passes through it.

That smallness is the design working, not failing. A payments network built to move money for a fraction of a cent cannot also collect large fees, and Stellar does not try to. What it does collect goes into a network fee pool rather than to any company or foundation, and the amount reaching the people running the network is measured at zero.

One limit belongs here. The fee record begins in January 2020, against a network that launched in 2014. Roughly five and a half years are missing entirely, and no figure on this page is an all-time or lifetime total.

Across the record, users have paid $2,070,920 in fees, and the shape is flatter than most projects covered here.

Annual totals ran $2,979 in 2020, then $232,447 in 2021, falling to $71,464 in 2022 and recovering slowly through 2023 and 2024 at around $110,000 to $126,000 a year. Then 2025 brought $1,236,116, roughly ten times the year before it and more than half of everything the network has ever collected. The busiest single month in the record is August 2025 at $235,366.

2026 has fallen back. Through mid-September the year stands at $293,279, which annualises close to where the network sat in 2021. The most recent three months run at a pace of $452,568 a year, below the trailing-year total.

So the honest description is a small, stable fee base with one exceptional year in it, now returning toward its longer-run level. Nothing published explains what happened in 2025.

Stellar's market value, the price of every XLM in existence multiplied together, is $8,173,154,327. Divide that by the annualised fee run-rate from the most recent three months and Stellar trades at roughly 18,060 times its current yearly fee income.

For comparison, a wireless network project once traded at roughly 87,000 times its own fees. Stellar is well inside that, and smaller than Dogecoin or Zcash, but it is still one of the wider gaps on this site.

Two things bound what the number means. The two figures are measured three months apart, so it is closer to an estimate than a clean division. And a payments network that charges a fraction of a cent by design will always produce a large multiple on this test, because the denominator is small on purpose. That does not make the multiple wrong. It makes it a poor single measure of whether the network is doing anything.

Stellar launched with 100 billion lumens. An inflation mechanism then created more, at about one percent a year, until supply reached roughly 105 billion.

Two things happened in late 2019 and they were separate decisions. In October, the inflation mechanism was switched off by a vote of the network's validators, having generated 5,443,902,087 lumens over its life. Then in November, the Foundation destroyed 55.4 billion lumens, about half of everything in existence, by sending them to an account nobody holds the keys to. That second decision was the Foundation's alone, made about tokens it controlled, without a vote.

Today 50,001,786,840 lumens exist and the burn address holds 55,442,115,248. There is no maximum supply figure, because no new lumens are created: the total is fixed by what survived 2019.

One figure to be careful with. The ledger itself reports 105,443,902,087 lumens, because destroyed tokens still sit in that unspendable account. That number overstates the real supply by about 55 billion.

Of the 50 billion lumens that exist, the Stellar Development Foundation holds 14,887,265,652, about 29.8%. The remainder, 34,845,010,799, is what the Foundation counts as circulating.

That is a large share for a single organisation to hold, and it is worth stating plainly rather than softening. The Foundation publishes the figure itself, updates it continuously, and states what its mandate for those lumens is, so this is disclosure rather than something uncovered.

It is also the same organisation that unilaterally destroyed half the supply in 2019. Taken together, those two facts say that decisions about XLM can be made by one body when it chooses, and that the body making them owns close to a third of the token.

Beyond the network itself, a set of applications runs on Stellar holding user funds. The total value inside them is a standard measure of how much real activity an ecosystem is getting.

Stellar's is at its highest level ever. It peaked at $264,937,677 on 22 August 2026 and sits near $242 million now. The yearly highs run $38 million in 2024, $168 million in 2025, and $265 million in 2026: roughly sevenfold growth in two and a half years.

That makes Stellar unusual. Almost every other project covered here has seen this figure collapse from an earlier peak, by anywhere from half to more than ninety percent. Stellar's is still climbing.

Two flaws in the record are worth naming rather than hiding. The series froze at exactly $6,453,282 for 42 days in 2024, and shows a single day in March 2024 at about a fifth of its neighbours. Both are measurement faults, not events.

Stellar has a security record, and it is neither blank nor alarming. Five things are on the public record, all of them disclosed by the Foundation itself.

In April 2017, two bugs allowed lumens to be created out of nothing, and Stellar's own release notes mark both as exploited; the Foundation destroyed lumens afterward to restore the ledger. In 2018, a rounding error in small trades was exploited. In May 2019 the network halted for 67 minutes when validators could not reach agreement, which the Foundation says is the only halt in Stellar's history. In 2023, a flaw allowed a remote crash. And between September and October 2025, a bug corrupted data in 478 of Stellar's smart contracts, of which 84 were still corrupted when it was fixed by a validator vote.

None of these produced a permanent loss of user funds, and each was fixed. For a network that has been running for twelve years and moves money for a living, that is a reasonably good record, and it is worth knowing in its actual shape rather than assuming there is nothing there.