Stellar operates on distributed ledger technology, which is open-source, community-owned, and distributed by the community. Its token, the XLM (or Lumens), fuels activity on the Stellar network — a system designed to help payments (and currencies) cross borders faster and cheaper than with traditional financial-system networks. The Stellar payment protocol achieves this by converting financial resources into XLM and then into the requested currency within a few seconds. For example, a bank in Japan might use Stellar to send money to a bank in Mexico. Stellar would automatically convert yen to XLM, send the payment via blockchain, and reconvert XLM to pesos at the current exchange rate. Stellar was intended to work alongside existing assets and cryptocurrencies, allowing users to create digital representations of any asset as a Stellar token. These can then be used to transact on the blockchain and can be redeemed at any time for the base asset. The network aims to maintain a level of security, with XLM holders required to have at least one token to remain active on the network. This feature aims to execute network transactions efficiently and with minimal time costs. As a decentralized financial network, no single entity can process transactions or stop someone from onboarding or offboarding into Stellar, and the network can still run successfully even if some servers are turned off or fail.