Swap Stellar (XLM)

The numbers below were checked on 14 October 2026 against developers.stellar.org and the Stellar protocol repository on github.com.

A ledger every 5–7 seconds, no mining

Stellar has validators rather than miners. They run the Stellar Consensus Protocol, agree on a set of transactions, and apply it as a new ledger; the Stellar stack documentation puts that at every 5 to 7 seconds. There is no queue in the Bitcoin sense: a transaction either enters the next ledger or two, or it fails with a result code and is gone. Once a ledger closes it is final.

Confirmations the site waits for

The route data behind this site counts an XLM deposit after 10 ledgers — under a minute of ledgers — and the estimate reads 2–6 minutes, almost all of it matching the deposit and preparing the payout. The route with a page here runs the other way, BTC → XLM, and its clock is Bitcoin's: 2 confirmations, about 21–44 minutes, then an XLM payout that is final within a ledger or two of being sent.

Fees: 100 stroops, and where they go

Every transaction pays at least 100 stroops per operation — a stroop is one ten-millionth of a lumen, so the minimum for a single payment is 0.00001 XLM. The sender offers a maximum; the network charges the lowest amount that gets the transaction in, and only under surge pricing, when more operations arrive than fit, does the fee become a bid. The lumens collected are sent to a locked account and are not given to or used by anyone — not burned as on the XRP Ledger, but equally out of circulation.

Reserves: 1 XLM to exist, 0.5 XLM per thing

A Stellar account exists only once it holds the minimum balance of two base reserves, and the base reserve is 0.5 XLM. So a brand-new G… address needs a first payment of at least 1 XLM, and that lumen stays locked as long as the account does. Every subentry afterwards — a trust line to another asset, an open offer, an extra signer, a data entry — adds one more base reserve, and a liquidity-pool share adds two. An account can hold at most 1,000 subentries. Validators can vote to change the base reserve; the docs say that is uncommon.

Supply: fixed, and smaller than it was

100 billion lumens were created when the network went live. For its first five years the supply grew by about 1% a year through an inflation mechanism; a validator vote ended that on 28 October 2019. On 4 November 2019 the Stellar Development Foundation sent 55,442,095,285.7418 lumens to a single locked address — an account with no signers, which the docs count as removed from the supply forever. The lumens page listed the total as 50,001,786,839.9124767 on 21 July 2026, and stellar.org states that no more lumens will be created.

One lumen is the price of a new account. If you are paid out to a wallet that has never held XLM and the amount after fees is under 1 XLM, the payment fails on the network. Fund the address first or choose an amount comfortably above it.

A Stellar address is a public key encoded as a strkey: Base32, 56 characters, beginning with G, with a 16-bit CRC checksum at the end. The encoding is defined in SEP-23 on github.com, checked on 14 October 2026. Two other prefixes exist and are not for a payout.

What the form accepts

For an XLM payout the form takes a G… address of 56 characters and checks the checksum, and it offers a memo field of the ID type — a whole number from 0 to 2⁶⁴ − 1. It does not take M… addresses, because the network's own payment operation addresses a G… account and the ID belongs in the memo; services that show an M… address can also show the G… form with a memo. It does not take C… addresses.

The four memo types

A Stellar transaction can carry one memo, of one of four types, as the operations-and-transactions page lists them:

The form's memo field is MEMO_ID. If an exchange shows a text memo and no numeric option, that route cannot be used for a payout to that exchange; check its deposit page first. Memo, destination tag, payment ID compares the mechanism across networks.

Which address to give

1. Your own wallet: its G… address, no memo. If the wallet is new, read the reserves section above: the first payment must be at least 1 XLM.
2. An exchange: the G… address and the memo from its XLM deposit page, both copied, the memo into the memo field. Exchanges pool every customer behind one account, and the memo is the only thing that makes the payment yours.
3. Another person: their G… address, no memo unless they say otherwise.

The deposit side

The deposit address the form shows is a G… account and may come with a memo of its own. If it does, enter it in your wallet's memo field or on the exchange's withdrawal form; a deposit that arrives without it reaches the address and is not matched to your swap until support finds it by hash.

Every Stellar transaction has a 64-character hash in hexadecimal. The status page links the Stellar side of a swap to StellarExpert; the same hash opens on any Stellar explorer, and the network's own Horizon API returns it as JSON for anyone who prefers the raw record.

What a transaction page shows: the ledger it was applied in and that ledger's close time, the source account that paid the fee, the fee charged in stroops, the memo and its type, and then each operation — for a payout, a single payment operation with the destination G… account, the asset (XLM, shown as "native") and the amount. A transaction that failed shows a result code and a fee charged; the payment inside it did not happen.

Result codes worth knowing

A deposit you sent

1. Copy the hash from your wallet or from the exchange's withdrawal history.
2. Open it on the explorer. Stellar applies a transaction within seconds, so a hash that cannot be found a minute after sending was never submitted; exchanges hold withdrawals for internal checks before anything reaches the network.
3. Check the destination against the deposit address from the form, the memo against the one shown with it, and the amount against the figure you entered.
4. The status page updates on its own at the tenth ledger.

A payout you received

1. Open the payout hash from the status page.
2. The destination is your G… address; the amount is "You get" from the form, with the payout network fee already taken out. If you gave a memo, it is shown with the transaction.
3. An exchange credits the payout after it reads the memo; a personal wallet shows it at once. If the account was new, the explorer's account page shows the 1 XLM minimum balance it now holds.
4. Keep the hash. It is the evidence the payout happened and what support on either side will ask for.

Reading an account page

An account page on the explorer lists the XLM balance, the number of subentries and the resulting minimum balance, the trust lines and the signers. It is the quickest way to see why a wallet will not send its whole balance: the locked part is the minimum balance line.

What a block explorer shows about a swap does the same walk for other networks; Reading a swap status page explains each stage.

Stellar's mistakes are the memo and the minimum balance, with one Stellar-specific addition: the text memo the form cannot carry.

The memo, and the type of the memo

On the XRP Ledger the extra field is always a number. On Stellar it has four types, and an exchange decides which it reads. Most read MEMO_ID, which is what the form sends; some show MEMO_TEXT. A text memo cannot be expressed as an ID, and a numeric memo sent to an exchange expecting text may not be matched. The deposit page says which; read it before choosing a payout into XLM at an exchange, and when in doubt pay out to your own wallet first.

Trust lines and the payout

A payout here is XLM, the native asset, which every account can hold without a trust line. If you have been given an address meant for a different asset on Stellar — a dollar token, say — the XLM still arrives, because every Stellar account holds XLM; what the receiver expected is their concern, not the network's. The reverse does not apply: the form pays XLM only.

A new wallet and the minimum balance

Wallet apps show a G… address before the account exists. The account is created by a first payment of at least 1 XLM; the explorer shows such an address as not found until then. The route minimum is usually above 1 XLM, but a swap sized close to it can land under after the network fee. Check "You get" against 1 XLM before giving a fresh address.

Less arrives than the form expects

Exchanges take their withdrawal fee out of the amount you type. The swap runs on what arrived; if the shortfall takes it under the route minimum it cannot be processed as a swap at all. Minimums, maximums and network fees on small swaps shows how the minimum is set.

A closed Stellar ledger is final. A payment with the wrong memo is a valid payment to a valid account; what happens next is the exchange's manual process, if it has one.

Stellar changes by protocol upgrade, voted in by validators, and most upgrades concern the decentralised exchange, asset issuance and, since 2024, smart contracts. The changes that matter to someone sending or receiving XLM are below; dates are from developers.stellar.org and the Stellar protocol repository on github.com, read on 14 October 2026.

The end of inflation, October 2019. Stellar originally added about 1% to the supply each year and distributed it by vote. Validators switched the mechanism off on 28 October 2019, after it had created 5,443,902,087.3472865 lumens over five years. Since then the only movement in supply is downward.

The reduction, November 2019. A week later the Stellar Development Foundation sent 55,442,095,285.7418 lumens to an account with no signers — an address nothing can ever spend from, which the docs count as removed from the supply. Of the 100 billion created at launch, about 50 billion remain, and stellar.org states that no more will be created. For a transfer this changes nothing; it is the reason the supply figure on this page is half what older articles say.

Muxed accounts. SEP-23 defines the M… string: a G… public key plus a 64-bit ID, encoded together into 69 characters, with the same CRC checksum. Services that use them can tell customers apart by address rather than by memo. The network's payment operation still targets a G… account, so the form takes the G… form and a MEMO_ID.

Contract accounts. Stellar's smart-contract platform gives contracts C… addresses, and a contract transaction carries exactly one operation. The accounts page lists G… and C… as the two account types. A C… address is not a wallet, and a payout cannot go to one.

What the reserve has done. The base reserve has been 0.5 XLM throughout the period the pages describe; validators can vote to change it and the docs call that uncommon. The 100-stroop minimum fee is likewise the figure on the pages read.

What has not changed. The G… address, the four memo types, the 100-stroop floor, and a ledger that closes in seconds and is final when it does. An address funded in 2015 still receives lumens today.

Stellar and the XRP Ledger are the two fast, validator-run ledgers here that ask for an extra field when the receiver is an exchange. People who hold one often hold the other, and the mechanics are close enough that the differences are what catch them. The table uses the confirmation counts and times the site is built from and what was checked on developers.stellar.org and xrpl.org on 14 October 2026; the XRP side is described on the XRP page.

The extra field. The XRP tag is always a number, and an exchange either reads it or rejects a payment without one. The Stellar memo has four types, and the form can send only the ID type. That is the one practical difference a sender meets: an XLM payout to an exchange that shows a text memo needs a different plan, while an XRP payout to any exchange needs only its tag.

Reserves. Both ledgers refuse to create an account below a minimum: 1 XLM, 1 XRP. Stellar's per-entry reserve of 0.5 XLM is larger than the XRP Ledger's 0.2 XRP per object, so an account with many trust lines locks more on Stellar.

Fees. Both are tiny. Stellar sends its fees to an account no one controls; the XRP Ledger destroys them. Neither goes to a validator.

Time. Ten Stellar ledgers and two XRP ledgers are both well under a minute; the site's windows overlap almost entirely.

Routes. XLM has one route page, from BTC, and appears as the sending side in the form. XRP has three. Both coins are receiving coins for Bitcoin, so the clock on each page's route is Bitcoin's 21–44 minutes, and the ledger at the end is the part that happens in seconds.