Stellar Development foundation is the company behind Lumens. Initially, the cryptocurrency was referred to as Stellars, but the name was changed to Lumens in 2015. It was created by Jed McCaleb who was, prior to this, one of Ripple’s co-founders. McCaleb left Ripple to pursue a different vision, which was a blockchain network that was more versatile. At first, Stellars were based on pretty much the same blockchain as Ripple, but the system did not work well. At some point, it even crashed the network, so the company created a different technology.
Stellar Lumens transactions are also recorded on a distributed ledger. However, unlike other cryptocurrencies that require miners to maintain the ledger, Lumens uses a different technology – Stellar Consensus Protocol. This new technology relies on a consensus algorithm instead of mining, and was the first safe construction of a federated Byzantine agreement (FBA). The system uses less power to verify transactions, while at the same time being faster. The company prides itself in the ability to process transactions within 2 – 5 seconds, which is faster compared to other cryptocurrencies.