On July 19th, Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin (LTC), congratulated Stellar (XLM) on passing LTC’s marketcap and edging it out from the number 6 spot according to coinmarketcap.com. Charlie stated the following via Twitter:
Congrats to Stellar on passing Litecoin’s marketcap. That said, it really doesn’t make sense to compare marketcaps of coins that are “printed”, b/c they have an inflated marketcap. Maybe I’m old school, but I only care about decentralized mineable coins.
Since then, XLM has retained the number 6 spot as can be seen in the screenshot below.
Doing the math, XLM need only be valued at $0.2464 to surpass the current market capitalization of EOS. This value could become a reality due to the following factors that has put XLM ahead in terms of market momentum.
Potential listing on Coinbase
On July 13th, the team at Coinbase informed the crypto-verse that it was exploring the addition of 5 digital assets on its platform. They include Cardano (ADA), Stellar (XLM), Basic Attention Token (BAT), ZCash (ZEC) and Ox (ZRX). Given the fact that a similar announcement – made in June – considering the listing of Ethereum Classic (ETC) actually materialized, then there is a high chance that the group of 5 will be added on Coinbase. Once this happens, the only way is up for XLM.
facebook Rumors
On Friday, August 10th, a story broke that Stellar had partnered with the social media giant known as facebook. The rumors had hinted that the two firms would work on the creation of a Stellar-based blockchain solution for facebook. The latter company has since denied the partnership rumors but the question still lingers in the crypto-verse.
The IBM factor
The Stellar foundation and IBM have been in a solid partnership for quite sometime now. Notable collaborations include the following:
- IBM working on a stable-coin that is built on the Stellar blockchain
- IBM winning a contract for a 5 year deal to develop blockchain solutions in collaboration with the Australian government
- IBM running 9 Stellar nodes to settle cross-border transactions. IBM is also in partnerships with approximately 20 global central banks
- Veridium Labs and IBM using the Stellar blockchain to track global Carbon Emissions
In conclusion, the Stellar project and coin seem to have a lot going for them in the past few months. These developments will most likely result in XLM edging out EOS from the number 5 spot. Another possibility is XLM ending up surpassing XRP and claiming the number 3 spot.
