Fast and secure global payments with Stellar

Abstract

International payments are slow and expensive, in part because of multi-hop payment routing through heterogeneous banking systems. Stellar is a new global payment network that can directly transfer digital money anywhere in the world in seconds. The key innovation is a secure transaction mechanism across untrusted intermediaries, using a new Byzantine agreement protocol called SCP. With SCP, each institution specifies other institutions with which to remain in agreement; through the global interconnectedness of the financial system, the whole network then agrees on atomic transactions spanning arbitrary institutions, with no solvency or exchange-rate risk from intermediary asset issuers or market makers. We present SCP's model, protocol, and formal verification; describe the Stellar payment network; and finally evaluate Stellar empirically through benchmarks and our experience with several years of production use.