XRP vs Stellar: Two Networks, One Founder
7 min read · Updated
Two payment networks, one origin
Most crypto comparisons put two unrelated projects side by side. This one doesn't. The XRP Ledger and Stellar share a founder, a founding codebase and the same stated goal: move money across borders faster and cheaper than banks do. They then spent more than a decade disagreeing about who that money is for.
XRP is the native asset of the XRP Ledger, the network Ripple builds on and sells to banks and payment companies.
XLM, called lumens, is the native asset of Stellar, a network run by a non-profit aimed at remittances and at people banks serve badly.
The 2014 split and the Stellar fork
Jed McCaleb co-created the XRP Ledger with David Schwartz and Arthur Britto, and it went live in June 2012. The company that became Ripple was built around it. McCaleb left in 2014 after disagreements over direction and launched Stellar later that year with the lawyer Joyce Kim, funded by an early donation from Stripe.
Stellar began as a fork of the XRP Ledger codebase and behaved like one: a 2014 ledger fork stalled the young network. In 2015 Stellar replaced the inherited consensus with the Stellar Consensus Protocol, designed by the Stanford cryptographer David Mazieres. After that the two are relatives rather than clones. McCaleb finished selling his lumens in 2021 and has run neither project for years.
Who runs each network
Ripple and the institutional thesis
Ripple is a private, for-profit company. It sells software to banks and payment providers, runs Ripple Payments (once marketed as On-Demand Liquidity) and issues RLUSD, a dollar stablecoin launched in December 2024 that passed two billion dollars in circulation by August 2026. Ripple also holds a large XRP position, most of it in on-chain escrow that releases a billion XRP a month and re-locks the unused part. That holding funds the company, and it is the most common objection to XRP: the network's largest single interest is a business with shareholders.
The Stellar Development Foundation and financial inclusion
The Stellar Development Foundation is a non-profit. Its mission is financial inclusion: remittance corridors, cash-in and cash-out points, and dollar access where the local currency is losing value. Its large lumen reserve funds grants rather than shareholders, which changes the incentive but not the concentration. Circle issues USDC and EURC natively on Stellar. MoneyGram has worked with the foundation since 2021, extended that partnership toward Latin America in April 2026, and launched its own dollar stablecoin, MGUSD, on Stellar in June 2026.
XRP and XLM side by side
Figures below are current as of September 2026 and will move.
| Feature | XRP Ledger | Stellar |
|---|---|---|
| Settlement time | 3-5 seconds | about 5 seconds |
| Fee | about 0.00001 XRP, destroyed | 0.00001 XLM per operation, destroyed |
| Throughput | around 1,500 transactions per second | around 1,000 operations per second |
| Consensus | XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol, unique node list | Stellar Consensus Protocol, quorum slices |
| Maximum supply | 100 billion, fixed at launch | about 50 billion after the 2019 burn |
| In circulation | about 68 billion, with 31 billion in Ripple escrow | about 35 billion, the rest held by the foundation |
| Ongoing issuance | none; fees are burned | none; 1% inflation switched off in 2019 |
| Steward | Ripple, a for-profit company | Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit |
| Smart contracts | built-in AMM and order book; EVM sidechain since 2025 | Soroban on mainnet since March 2024 |
Supply and issuance
Neither asset is mined and neither pays a block reward, so neither carries the miner sell pressure that Bitcoin and Ethereum do. The XRP supply of 100 billion was fixed at genesis, and fees are destroyed rather than paid to anyone, so the total shrinks: about 14 million XRP in fourteen years, roughly 0.014% of the original. Calling XRP deflationary is technically true and, at that rate, close to meaningless.
Stellar started at 100 billion lumens with a 1% annual inflation mechanism that validators switched off in 2019, and that November the foundation burned more than half the supply. Stellar burns fees too. Both stewards hold large undistributed reserves, which is why circulation sits well below each cap.
Validators: unique node list versus quorum slices
Neither network uses mining or staking. Both ask each node to choose which other nodes it trusts. On the XRP Ledger a node follows a unique node list, meaning the validators whose votes it counts. Most operators use a default list published by Ripple and the XRP Ledger Foundation: around 35 validators out of more than 150 on the network. Ripple runs only a few of them, but the default list is a coordination point, and adopting it is a decision most operators never revisit.
Stellar generalises the idea. Each node publishes quorum slices, the sets whose agreement it will accept, and network-wide quorums emerge from those overlapping choices. In practice the foundation's validators appear in most slices, so the concentration looks similar even though the mechanism is more flexible.
Both networks are fast because they replaced open competition with a trust list, and both are more concentrated than their marketing suggests.
Smart contracts: Hooks, AMM and Soroban
Stellar is ahead here. Soroban, its contract platform written in Rust and running on WebAssembly, has been live on mainnet since March 2024, backed by a 100 million dollar adoption fund. It is nowhere near Ethereum's scale, but it is a general-purpose contract environment on the base layer.
The XRP Ledger adds specific features as protocol amendments instead: a built-in order book, an automated market maker, escrow, payment channels and token issuance with freeze and clawback. Hooks, small and deliberately limited code attached to accounts, have been in development for years and as of September 2026 are still not enabled on the main network. For full programmability Ripple points developers at the XRPL EVM sidechain, live since mid-2025, which runs Ethereum contracts on a chain bridged to the main ledger.
What each network actually moves
Both projects have real volume, and both have been marketed harder than that volume justifies: a bank "using RippleNet" often means Ripple's messaging software, with no XRP involved. Ripple's clearest use is Ripple Payments, where XRP is bought and sold within seconds to bridge two currencies, removing the need for money parked abroad. The busiest corridors are those with expensive remittances and thin banking links: the US to Mexico and the Philippines, and the Gulf to India. Ripple reports dozens of live corridors and hundreds of institutional customers, though far fewer touch XRP itself.
Stellar's clearest use is stablecoins and cash access. Most Stellar volume today is USDC moving between wallets and payout partners rather than XLM, with lumens paying fees and bridging where no direct market exists. MoneyGram's network of physical agents is the piece no other crypto network has: a wallet balance turned into cash over a counter.
Regulatory standing
XRP has the longest regulatory history of any major token. The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020. In July 2023 Judge Analisa Torres ruled that XRP sales on exchanges were not securities transactions while certain institutional sales were; a 2024 judgment added a 125 million dollar penalty and an injunction. Both sides dropped their appeals in August 2025, which ended the case. XRP trades legally on US exchanges, and Ripple's direct institutional sales there remain restricted.
Stellar never faced the equivalent. The SEC has not sued the foundation and XLM has been the subject of no comparable US action, an absence of litigation rather than a ruling in its favour. Neither asset has been declared a non-security by statute, and treatment varies by country.
Which thesis fits which network
The XRP thesis is that regulated institutions rebuild cross-border settlement, that a for-profit company with banking relationships and its own stablecoin is the right vehicle, and that value accrues to a bridge asset those institutions trade in volume.
The Stellar thesis is that the demand sits at the retail edge, in remittances, dollar access and cash-out points, that a non-profit is a more durable steward than a company, and that value accrues to whichever network moves stablecoins cheaply at scale.
Both theses share one weak point, worth stating plainly: neither network needs a rising native token to work. Stablecoins settle fine on both. The role of XRP and XLM as bridge assets is real but small next to their market values, and the rest of each price is a bet on demand that has not arrived.
Risks both networks share
Supply concentrated in one organisation. Validator sets smaller and more coordinated than the documentation implies. Competition from bank consortium networks, from stablecoins on cheaper chains, and from a SWIFT that keeps getting faster. Both assets are volatile, and both have spent years far below previous highs.
None of this is investment advice, and nothing here recommends either asset. If you are comparing them, compare what each network actually settles rather than what it is announced to be settling. Those numbers are public on both ledgers, and they are the one part of this comparison nobody can spin.