Published date: May 28, 2026 | Author: Author (Crypto Gas Station)
Introduction: The screen is full of green, except for a red pillar of XLM.
The author opened the disk at 7 o’clock this morning, and his first reaction was to rub his eyes.
BTC fell by 1.99%, ETH fell by 2.57%, SOL fell by 2.01%, XRP fell by 2.12%, and even BNB, which has always been as stable as an old dog, fell by 1.66%. There are only two red pillars in the Top 20, one is RAIN with a market capitalization of US$9 billion (small-cap coins are not counted), and the other is XLM (Stellar Lumens), which ranks 22nd in market capitalization, rising 17.91% in 24 hours and 19.86% in 7 days.
Opening CoinGecko’s trending list, XLM has shot all the way to second place – second only to BONK. An “old coin” with a market value of nearly 6 billion US dollars can be so vicious in the days when the market is generally falling. The author must break down this abnormality and explain it clearly.
What’s more, the narrative of XLM’s rise is not air. It has stepped on the hardest main line in 2026: cross-border liquidation of real world assets (RWA) and stable currency legal currency channels. This is not driven by sentiment in meme coins, but by fundamentals.
The author has been working in encryption for 7 years, and has seen too many “cross-border payment” stories that sound big but have failed miserably. Stellar is one of the few projects that has not died in its eighth year and is still attracting users. Today it can buck the trend and soar. Is it a real turning point or another rebound trap? This article is 5,000 words long, covering data, narrative, comparison, and risks.
Don’t be long-winded and get straight to the point.
Section 1: Let’s look at the data first – how strong is this wave of XLM?
The author first lists the real-time data pulled from CoinGecko this morning to give everyone an intuitive feeling:
| Indicators | XLM Current Data | Comparison (XRP) |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0.1743 | $1.30 |
| Market capitalization ranking | No. 22 | No. 5 |
| Market cap | $5.847 billion | $80.56 billion |
| 24h increase | +17.91% | -2.11% |
| 7-day increase | +19.86% | -5.45% |
| 30-day gain | +5.27% | -6.91% |
| 24h trading volume | US$627 million | US$1.769 billion |
| Drop from ATH | -80.11% | -64.31% |
| Circulation volume | 33.56 billion pieces | — |
The data tells me three things:
First, today’s surge is not an isolated incident, but a continuation of a 7-day trend. From $0.145 on May 21, it has pushed all the way to $0.174 today. In other words, funds have continued to buy in the past week, and today is just a day of concentrated emotion.
Second, the relative trading volume is extremely high. XLM’s market capitalization is only 7% of XRP’s, but its 24-hour trading volume is 35% of XRP’s. The conversion rate of XLM is 5 times that of XRP. There are only two explanations for this kind of market: either a giant whale is moving chips, or there is really big news brewing. The author prefers the latter.
Third, still 80% down from its all-time high. XLM’s ATH in January 2018 was $0.875. Even with today’s rise, it is still below 20% of the historical top. This means that the chips above are relatively thin, and the rebound space is theoretically much greater than that of XRP – but it also means that the risk is more unpredictable.
The author has 7 years of experience in currency speculation. When encountering such a market with “the whole market is green and a single currency is red”, the first thing is not to rush, but to ask: Where does the money come from? **
Section 2: Where does the money come from – three main narrative lines are ignited at the same time
The author reviewed all the news, community discussions and on-chain data related to Stellar in the past 72 hours, and found three main lines that were ignited at the same time.
Narrative 1: Stellar becomes a new channel for USDC cross-chain liquidation
This is the hardest one.
People familiar with this circle should remember that since the second half of 2025, Circle (the issuer of USDC) has been promoting “multi-chain native USDC (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, CCTP)”, with the purpose of allowing USDC to cross-chain without bridges between different public chains. Solana, Base, and Arbitrum have already been connected. In early May this year, Circle included Stellar in the second batch of CCTP V2 access lists.
What does it mean? This means that anyone holding USDC on Ethereum or Solana can move their assets to Stellar in seconds with zero fees, and then withdraw funds from Stellar to fiat currency through a local anchor (cooperating exchange/bank) – this is the first time in eight years that Stellar has truly achieved the position of “global U.S. dollar highway toll station”.
The author will show you this business model:
- You are in Europe and want to send $50,000 to a supplier in the Philippines.
- Traditional SWIFT: 2-5 days, cost 30-50 US dollars, and you have to pay the exchange difference in the middle
- USDC + Stellar path: 5 seconds for on-chain transfer, cost 0.0001 XLM (approximately $0.00002 USD), about 1-2 hours for withdrawal to Stellar anchor into Philippine Peso PHP
Once this business starts running, XLM’s role will be Gas + anchored currency exchange bridge. Every cross-border payment consumes one point of XLM.
Narrative 2: MoneyGram + Western Union second collaboration rumors
The author wants to put a label first – this is an unofficially confirmed rumor, but the community discussion is very intensive.
Stellar has had in-depth cooperation with MoneyGram in 2021-2022, allowing MoneyGram’s retail outlets to support USDC/XLM deposits and withdrawals. Later, the cooperation cooled down due to compliance reviews. In the past week, there have been several internal sources related to MoneyGram circulating on X: Stellar will soon announce access to a new generation of remittance channel providers. Whether it is a second-generation cooperation with MoneyGram or another company, there is currently no official confirmation.
The author has been doing content for so many years and knows that this kind of “unconfirmed positive” is extremely powerful in the encryption market – once the news is true, XLM may rise more than today; if it is proven false, the correction will be fierce.
Narrative 3: RWA assets on Stellar exceed $100 million
On May 26, Franklin Templeton publicly disclosed that the size of its BENJI currency fund token on the Stellar chain exceeded $100 million. BENJI is one of the earliest products on the institutional side to deploy public chain RWA. It will be launched on Stellar and Polygon in early 2024. The figures disclosed this time mean that Stellar has quietly entered the first echelon in terms of actual RWA management scale.
The author has been following the RWA track for a long time and knows the weight of this number: BlackRock’s BUIDL is mainly in Ethereum, with a scale of about 5 billion US dollars; Ondo’s OUSG is about 700 million US dollars; Stellar’s BENJI is 100 million US dollars – it doesn’t seem big, but Stellar’s on-chain TVL totals only 500 million US dollars, and BENJI accounts for 20% of it. This shows that traditional financial institutions recognize the “low fee + strong compliance” combination of the Stellar chain.
Three narratives ignited in the same week, and the author believes that this is the real fuel for XLM’s surge today.
Section 3: Fighting with XRP – the final battle of cross-border payment coins
When talking about cross-border payment coins, XLM and XRP cannot be avoided. The two brothers have the same roots – Jed McCaleb founded Stellar after leaving Ripple, and the technical architecture is very similar. But positioning, ecology, and user groups have taken completely different paths.
The author uses a table to list the differences at this point in May 2026:
| Dimensions | XLM (Stellar) | XRP (Ripple) |
|---|---|---|
| Positioning | Inclusive finance + individual small-amount cross-border | Inter-bank settlement + institutional liquidity |
| Customer portraits | Money transfer agencies, anchors, charities | Large banks, SWIFT alternatives |
| TVL | ~$500 million (DeFi) | — |
| RWA size | $100 million (BENJI) | Less |
| Consensus Mechanism | SCP (Federal Byzantium) | RPCA (Voting Node) |
| Block production speed | 5 seconds | 3-5 seconds |
| Single Fee | 0.00001 XLM | 0.00001 XRP |
| ETF progress | No spot ETF yet | Spot ETF has been approved |
| Main games | Competition with SWIFT and Wise | The legal battle with the SEC is over |
The author’s judgment: **XRP has relied on legal victory over the past two years + the concept of institutional ETFs, and its valuation has been fully priced by the market;
This is why XLM rose alone today – the market has finally begun to re-examine the other pole of the “cross-border payment currency” track that has always had no gimmicks but has quietly taken on business.
The author made a crude valuation comparison: If the same “market value/annual payment flow” multiple is given to XLM, and the market value is 8% of the liquidation flow on the Stellar chain in 2025 (approximately $70 billion), then XLM should be worth $5.6 billion – basically consistent with today’s $5.8 billion. In other words, XLM’s current price is not seriously undervalued, but it’s not eating up all the stories like XRP.
If the three narratives are realized one after another, XLM’s return to $0.30 (market value of about $10 billion) will be supported by fundamentals; if the narrative breaks, it is also reasonable to return to $0.12. The shock range is wide, and operations must be done with corresponding expectations.
Section 4: Stellar’s technical chassis—why it is suitable for cross-border payments
When I talk about technology, I try to speak in human terms.
Stellar uses SCP (Stellar Consensus Protocol), which is essentially “Federal Byzantium”. Each node selects a few nodes it trusts (called a quorum slice), and can reach a consensus without the need for the entire network to vote.
The benefits of this mechanism are:
- No mining, extremely low energy consumption (the author roughly calculates that a single transaction consumes about 0.0003 kilowatt hours, which is 9 orders of magnitude lower than BTC)
- Block generation in 5 seconds, confirmation is final, no need to wait for 6 blocks
- Extremely low handling fee, 0.00001 XLM per transaction, central server level cost
- Naturally supports multiple assets, any token is natively issued on the chain (USDC, EUROC, and local legal currency tokens all run on it)
The price is: less decentralized than BTC/ETH. SCP’s node list is actually led by the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) and its partners. This is an old problem. Some people complained about it in 2018, and it still has not been completely solved in 2026.
But I want to be fair to Stellar: in the cross-border payment business, the requirements for decentralization are far lower than the requirements for compliance and speed. A bank that does cross-border clearing does not care at all whether the chain is decentralized or not. It cares about the speed of payment, compliance review, and who bears the legal responsibility. Stellar has chosen a “light centralization, strong compliance” route, which is easier to connect with traditional finance.
Looking back in 2026, Stellar has not completely reduced to a speculative chain like EOS and Tron, nor has it been dominated by meme coins like BSC. It has really turned “low-rate cross-border clearing” into a profitable business. This chassis is more solid than most public chains.
Section 5: On-chain data perspective – Is there any “real money” in this rise?
I don’t like to read the market based on my feelings. The data on the chain is the hardest indicator to test the authenticity of the surge.
The author pulled several sets of data from Stellar Expert this morning:
- Number of active addresses in the past 7 days: increased from an average of 320,000 to 470,000 per day, an increase of 47%
- Number of on-chain transfers in the past 7 days: increased from an average of 5.8 million per day to 7.2 million, an increase of 24%
- On-chain USDC balance: $820 million on May 21, $1.24 billion on May 28, net inflow of $420 million
- Large Value Transfers (>1M XLM): 18 in the last 24 hours, 4x normal
Interpretation of these sets of data:
USDC’s net inflow of $420 million is the core signal. This shows that the actual business volume of cross-chain clearing is increasing and is not just speculation. After CCTP is connected, institutions and individuals begin to move USD assets to Stellar – this will directly translate into demand for XLM (deposits and withdrawals require XLM as gas and exchange bridge).
The 47% increase in active addresses is also “usage-driven” rather than “speculation-driven.” If it is pure speculation, the number of addresses will increase even more, but the amount will not follow. This time, the amount increased faster than the number of addresses, which means that users are doing “actually large” liquidations.
The author conservatively estimates that this wave of on-chain business volume growth can give XLM marginal buying for 2-4 weeks. But whether the surge in sentiment can continue depends on whether there are any official announcements in the next 1-2 weeks to fulfill the narrative.
Section 6: How to trade – three postures corresponding to three risk preferences
The author never gives specific position suggestions, but only clearly explains the logic of different playing styles.
Position 1: Fixed spot investment, long-term holding
Suitable for those who believe in the cross-border payment track and the implementation of RWA. Three steps:
- Buy XLM in small amounts on a weekly or monthly basis on mainstream exchanges (OKX, Binance)
- Add to the position if it falls below $0.14 (below the 7-day moving average), wait and see if it rises to $0.20
- The time dimension is 6-12 months, waiting for the ETF concept or large-scale cooperation to be implemented
The advantage of this posture is peace of mind, but the disadvantage is high opportunity cost.
Posture 2: Band operation
Suitable for short-term players. Key Support:
- Strong support: $0.155 (7-day EMA)
- Medium support: $0.14 (21-day EMA)
- Strong pressure: $0.20 (Jan 2025 high)
- Extreme Pressure: $0.28 (2024 High)
Stop loss recommendation is placed below $0.13. Band window is approximately 3-5 weeks.
Position 3: Long contract (high risk)
The author personally does not recommend high leverage. If it must be done, the capital ratio should not exceed 5% of the total position, the leverage should not exceed 5 times, and the stop loss must be strictly implemented. The liquidity of XLM’s contract is not as good as that of BTC/ETH, and the slippage will be worse.
Section 7: FAQ – The author has collected 8 of the most frequently asked questions
Q1: Are XLM and XRP the same thing?
No. The technical architecture of the two is similar, but their positioning is completely different: XRP focuses on inter-bank settlement, and XLM focuses on remittances by individuals and small and medium-sized institutions. XLM is a project started again after Jed McCaleb, one of the founders of XRP, left.
Q2: Does Stellar have a spot ETF?
There is currently (May 2026) no XLM spot ETF. Market expectations are that it will not be possible until the end of 2026 to 2027 at the earliest.
Q3: How much is the total amount of XLM? Inflation?
The total supply is 50 billion coins, and the circulation is about 33.56 billion coins. Stellar completely abolished the inflation mechanism in 2019. Since then, XLM has entered a “quasi-deflation” state – each transaction destroys a little XLM, and the total amount only decreases but does not increase.
Q4: How beneficial will the USDC cross-chain CCTP access be to the XLM price?
This is a mid- to long-term benefit. It will not be immediately reflected in the price in the short term, but it will continue to attract USDC to flow into the Stellar chain. Each transfer requires XLM as a handling fee currency. From a long-term perspective, the greater the transaction volume on the chain, the stronger the demand for XLM.
Q5: What is BENJI? Why is it important?
BENJI is a tokenized U.S. Treasury bond fund issued by Franklin Templeton, which is equivalent to an “on-chain currency fund.” It chooses Stellar as one of the issuance chains, which means that traditional finance recognizes Stellar’s compliance framework. This is a real implementation of RWA, not an air project.
Q6: Is it risky to chase XLM higher now?
From a short-term perspective, after a single-day increase of 17.91%, there will definitely be a correction. The author recommends not to chase the price at a high emotional point, and wait until it reaches around $0.16-0.165 before considering buying in batches.
Q7: Which wallet is safe to use to buy XLM?
Mainstream wallets include Lobstr, Solar Wallet (officially recommended by Stellar), and Ledger hardware wallet. The author personally uses the Ledger cold wallet for long-term storage, and the hot wallet uses Lobstr for daily operations. A cold wallet is a must-have for large amounts.
Q8: Will XLM return to zero?
The author thinks the probability is extremely low. Stellar has been running for 8 years, with TVL of 500 million, on-chain RWA of 100 million, and SDF holds a large amount of XLM reserves for ecological investment. Unless the entire crypto industry goes to zero, the probability of XLM going to zero alone is even lower than that of BTC.
Section 8: Risk Warning – The author must say ugly words first
Risk 1: News falsification
If the rumored MoneyGram/Western Union collaboration does not materialize with an official announcement, XLM will lose at least half of this sentiment. The author predicts that the callback target is around $0.14.
Risk 2: Regulatory uncertainty
Stellar’s stablecoin business may face rising compliance costs after entering the regulatory framework of MiCA and the U.S. Stablecoin Act in Europe and the United States. SDF is a foundation structure and is more regulated than Ripple.
Risk 3: Increased competition
There are more and more competitors on the cross-border payment track: Solana’s PYUSD channel, USDT on Tron, USDC on Base, and payment solutions on the SUI chain. XLM is not a “lone seedling” without rivals, and its market share will continue to be squeezed.
Risk 4: On-chain staking and early position concentration
Stellar’s early foundation holdings and cooperative institutional holdings are highly concentrated. Although there is lock-up and transparent disclosure, there is theoretically a risk of large selling pressure.
Risk 5: Technical single point of failure
Stellar has experienced two consensus network shutdowns in history (2019, 2021), each time recovering within a few hours. Although the SCP consensus is efficient, it is not as completely free of single points of failure as BTC PoW.
Conclusion: The old business of cross-border payment has finally come back after being neglected for five years.
The author finally talks about emotions.
In the crypto community, the easiest things to follow are new stories like memes and AI. And the “old business” that can really bring cash flow is always left out. Stellar is a typical “old business” – it has been doing cross-border payments for 8 years, cleared $70 billion, and supported a bunch of small remittance institutions, but its market value has been suppressed by XRP for a long time.
XLM rose 18% today. Essentially, the market has rediscovered an old thing: When USDC and USDT truly become the “global dollar”, the pipeline that moves them around at high speed is a business with real business, real rates, and real demand.
The author dare not say that XLM will definitely rise to 0.5 US dollars, but I dare to say: the cross-border payment currency track has been neglected for five years, and today it is starting to become popular again. XLM is the “second child” in this track, but it is also the one that is most easily underestimated by the market.
Over the next 2-4 weeks, keep an eye on three things:
- Whether Stellar officially announces new partners (verification narrative 2)
- Will the balance on the USDC chain continue to rise after CCTP V2 is connected (Verification Narrative 1)
- Are there any new RWA products outside of BENJI? (Verification Narrative 3)
If either one materializes, XLM has room to continue its upward trajectory. If all three items are falsified, then leave a comment to the author and I will continue to criticize the market.
It does not constitute investment advice. The market is risky, so be cautious when entering. The author’s observations should always be matched with your own judgment.
Appendix 1: Soroban smart contract—the last shortcoming that Stellar will make up for in 2024
This is the logic that I think is the most underestimated in this wave of XLM in the long term.
The biggest criticism of Stellar in recent years is not its performance or compliance, but its lack of Turing-complete smart contracts. Vitalik criticized Stellar back then, saying that it was just a “high-speed accounting book that cannot support complex financial logic.” Stellar has not fixed this shortcoming for 7 years.
Until March 2024, the Stellar mainnet launched Soroban – a smart contract platform based on Rust and WASM. Coupled with several upgrades in 2025, Soroban can already run most DeFi protocols, stablecoin bridging, on-chain identity and RWA compliance modules.
The author gives a specific example: In April this year, Aquarius DEX (the largest AMM on Stellar) migrated all its core trading engines to the Soroban contract, reducing gas costs by 40% and reducing block production speed from 5 seconds to 3 seconds. This kind of transformation cannot be done on Ethereum L1 because the Ethereum mainnet cannot achieve a 3-second ending.
The existence of Soroban gives Stellar for the first time hardware-level possibilities in the three things of “DeFi + RWA + cross-border payment”. BENJI’s US$100 million scale is directly related to the compliance modules provided by Soroban (KYC whitelist, transfer blacklist, regulatory hooks).
The author’s judgment: If the scale of RWA on Stellar can increase from 100 million to 500 million US dollars in the next 12 months, then the valuation level of XLM will be in line with the RWA leader on ETH.
Appendix 2: Historical Review – What happened in Stellar’s last big bull market
The author has been flipping K-lines for 5 years. Stellar’s last decent bull run was from late 2017 to January 2018, rising from $0.02 to $0.875, a 43x increase. The core narrative at the time was “IBM and Stellar cooperated for cross-border liquidation.”
Everyone knows the story behind it: the bear market is coming, IBM’s cooperation fell short of expectations, and XLM fell back to $0.04.
But one thing is worth reviewing: XLM has never broken above $0.5 since January 2018. Even in the big bull market in 2021, XLM only reached a maximum of $0.78 and did not break ATH. This is the biggest difference between Stellar and BTC, ETH, and SOL – it does not have the ability to continuously reach new highs, and each cycle becomes weaker.
Why? The author thinks there are two reasons:
- The total amount of Stellar is too large (50 billion), and the proportion of Foundation holdings is high, and the capital cost of raising the price is extremely high.
- The ceiling of the cross-border payment business is limited. The global annual cross-border remittance market is about 900 billion US dollars. Even if Stellar gets 10% of the market share, the annual liquidation flow will be 90 billion US dollars – based on a 5% valuation multiple, the market value will be 45 billion US dollars, corresponding to the XLM price of 1.34 US dollars.
This is the upper limit of my expected long-term price for holding XLM. $1.34 means there is still 7.8x room from today’s $0.17, but at the same time there is no possibility of a “100x coin” like SOL.
Whether this expectation is enough for you determines whether you want to enter XLM.
Appendix 3: Horizontal comparison with other cross-border payment coins
The author lists all the “cross-border payment/payment chains” that are still running in May 2026:
| Project | Market value | Business scale | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|
| |
| HBAR | 9 billion | Enterprise side | Strong governance, Google/IBM shares | Small number of users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TRX | 34.8 billion | USDT cross-border | Large USDT volume, penetration in Southeast Asia | Centralization, regulatory risks |
The author’s conclusion is: The pure payment currency track will focus on XLM and TRX in the next 12 months. XRP has been priced, HBAR has no consumer demand, and ALGO has failed to commercialize. XLM has a USDC channel, and TRX has a USDT channel—these two channels determine the future flow of funds.
If you are optimistic about the long-term growth of stablecoins, allocating some of each of XLM and TRX is a good hedging solution.
Written at the end: The author’s real position logic
Before the general market decline today, the author had already established a spot position of XLM near $0.155, accounting for 4% of his total crypto position. It rose to 0.174 today and I didn’t add any more. I will add more when it falls back to 0.16.
The author’s core judgment is that the cross-border payment currency track will be re-priced by the market in the second half of 2026. XLM is a scarce target that combines compliance, low rates, RWA implementation, and USDC channels. There are both opportunities and risks, but the risks can be quantified and losses can be stopped.
The author will continue to follow up on Stellar chain data and official announcements, and update the review once a week. If you are also holding a position, you are welcome to leave a message on the official account to communicate.
Extended reading (must read for novices)
- OKX Exchange Registration and Certification Complete Guide
- Binance Registration Tutorial: The entire process from scratch
- Cold wallet recommendation: How to choose a hardware wallet
- Introduction to buying coins for newbies: from account opening to first transaction