What's Happening With Stellar Lumens (XLM) Crypto?

Stellar (XLM), the coin underpinning the open network dedicated to helping financial firms connect with each other, traded over 27% higher on a seven-day trailing period at press time.

What Happened: The cryptocurrency traded 16.53% higher over 24 hours at $0.514 at press time. On an intra-day basis, XLM reached $0.545, a level 5.7% higher than its press-time price.

Meanwhile, the top currency by market capitalization, Bitcoin (BTC), traded 1.10% higher at $59,330.79 at press time.

An investigative journalist for Uganda’s NBS TV, Canary Mugume, tweeted that the Senegalese-American singer Aliaune Damala Badara Akon Thiam, better known simply as Akon, will build a city in Uganda known as Akon city by 2036. The city will operate on Akoin currency, which is based on XLM.

I asked Akon how much this would cost. He skipped the question thrice. https://t.co/fPqhbIAoIV

— Canary Mugume (@CanaryMugume) April 5, 2021

Why It Matters: Last week, it was reported that Visa Inc V has launched a pilot program to settle transactions via the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC), which uses the Stellar blockchain among others like Ethereum. Ethereum (ETH) traded 2.31% higher at $2,128.86 at press time.

Last Friday, Stellar announced a new way to run the infrastructure that powers its network, which it is calling Horizon 2.0.

Notably, XLM was originally created through a hard fork from XRP (XRP), the coin associated with Ripple, but the code was subsequently rewritten. XRP traded 34.3% higher at $0.86.

See also: How to Buy Stellar (XLM)

XRP has found footing this week after it reached an agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over redactions of documents in an ongoing legal tussle between the two.

In 2019, Stellar signed agreements with International Business Machines Corporation IBM to create a payments network. The Western Union Company WU also announced a partnership with a startup that leverages Stellar’s blockchain for cross-border payments.