Last week the price of XLM rose apparently out of nowhere, but something was going on. One is a rumor (perhaps already confirmed/debunked), and the other good news about Stellar Lumens development.
MoneyGram takeover
From price increase of Stellar may be due to news surrounding the Stellar Development Foundation. On Wednesday, anonymous sources told Bloomberg that the group behind Stellar expressed interest in an acquisition of MoneyGram International Inc.
The Stellar Development Foundation is part of the Stellar Network, the non-profit organization behind the Stellar Lumens token. The goal of the organization is to enable fast, low-cost cross-border payments and transfers with XLM. Stellar is reportedly working with private equity firm Advent International on the acquisition. However, no final decision has been made yet.
Ripple was before
The Stellar takeover rumor is not MoneyGram’s first involvement in cryptocurrencies. In 2019, the company partnered with Stellar competitor Ripple to offer international payment services using Ripple’s native token XRP. Due to Ripple’s ongoing regulatory issues with the SEC, MoneyGram officially ended its partnership with the company earlier this year.
What is Venus?
According to a blog post from the developers, Stellar Network is going to implement a new type of smart contract. The proposed design uses Turing Signing Servers or turrets. Developers can upload smart contracts to a turret; this turret can then create a key pair that is valid for signing transactions with this smart contract.
Then the transaction is signed by other turrets so that the blockchain considers it valid. Finally, users can run smart contracts for all turrets until the transaction is sufficiently signed.
New on the Community Blog: Our friends at @script3official wrote about Project Venus, which is exploring short-term forward contract capabilities on the Stellar network. https://t.co/5ujGtYIpWO
— Stellar (@StellarOrg) July 20, 2021
Project Venus is focused on building a secure and reliable network of servers and implementing short-term contract capabilities for Stellar’s blockchain.
Turrets and DeFi
If we are to believe Stellar’s blog, it means that there are far fewer transactions to be processed. A lot of data is processed outside the blockchain. Stellar writes that running smart contracts on turrets in this way is much more efficient than on Ethereum.
On Ethereum (and actually all blockchains that run on Ethereum Virtual Machine), smart contracts are executed via the entire virtual machine of the blockchain. According to the blog, Venus allows DeFi capabilities to pass through these turrets. And that would turn the entire Stellar ecosystem upside down.
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