The price of Stellar has gained a good eight percent in 24 hours and stands at $0.2329, or €0.2048. The obvious question is whether there is more behind the jump than market sentiment. So ins
The price of Stellar has gained a good eight percent in 24 hours and stands at $0.2329, or €0.2048. The obvious question is whether there is more behind the jump than market sentiment. So instead of writing up the price again, we measured the network itself: 999 consecutive ledgers from September 28, 2026, a window of 83 minutes, plus 2,000 individually settled transactions. Over that period 211,994 successful transactions passed through the Stellar network, an average of 41 per second, at a load of just over one fifth.
Two findings appear in no price report. Just over one in five submitted transactions fails and pays its fee anyway. And the famous minimum fee of 0.00001 XLM is not an advertising figure: 57.2 percent of all transactions are settled at exactly that rate, while the bids behind them run at almost five hundred times as much at the median.
cryptoticker.io collected this analysis itself on September 28 and 29, 2026. We examined 999 ledgers and 2,000 transactions.
XLM trades at $0.2329. That is 8.1 percent more than 24 hours ago and also 8.1 percent more than a week ago. Over 30 days the gain comes to 29.6 percent. The daily range ran from $0.2071 to $0.2343, so 13.1 percent lies between the low and the high. Anyone who bought at the daily low is sitting on a different result today than someone who came in at the high.
With a market capitalisation of $8.16 billion, Stellar ranks 20th among the largest crypto assets. Daily turnover is $814 million. Of a total 50.00 billion XLM, 35.01 billion are in circulation. The all-time high of $0.8756, reached on January 2, 2018, is still 73.4 percent away.
There is no single documented trigger for the move. What is documented is that Stellar activated Protocol 28 on its main network on September 17, 2026, an upgrade to consensus and contract management. The trade publication Blockonomi reported on September 20, 2026 that the network had reached 211 transactions per second in a test window covering more than 100 blocks. Whether that upgrade is carrying the price ten days later cannot be proven. What the network actually delivers today can be measured.
Across the 999 ledgers we measured, throughput came to a median of 41.2 successful transactions per second and an average of 42.4. The weakest ledger in the window managed 15.0 transactions per second, the strongest 84.0. That peak ledger processed 420 transactions with 875 operations in five seconds.
The gap to the 211 transactions per second from the test window is wide, and it is no contradiction. A test window measures what the technology delivers under full load. Our measurement shows the real load of an ordinary evening. The two figures answer different questions, and for you as an investor the second one matters more, because it describes how much headroom the network has right now.
A ledger is to Stellar what a block is to Bitcoin: a closed set of transactions that the validators confirm together and that stands unchangeable afterwards. It comes about through the Stellar Consensus Protocol, or SCP, a federated Byzantine agreement procedure in which every node decides for itself which other nodes it trusts.
In our window a ledger closed exactly every 5.0 seconds, at the median as at the maximum, without a single outlier to the upside. In practice that means a Stellar transfer is normally final after five to ten seconds, because it waits for the next ledger and is settled from then on. Confirmation chains as with Bitcoin, where recipients wait for several blocks, do not exist here.
A ledger closes every five seconds, carrying 206 transactions on average.
In the current network every ledger has room for up to 1,000 transactions. At the median, 206 of those slots were taken, so 20.6 percent. The fullest ledger in the window reached 420 transactions and with that 42.0 percent. The network ran throughout at around one fifth of its capacity.
That figure is interesting for two reasons. First, it explains why transfers go through promptly: whoever has room does not have to push. Second, it shows that a markedly rising payment volume on Stellar would not create congestion to begin with. Anyone who uses network load as an argument for or against an investment should therefore keep looking at it, because a single reading ages quickly.
In the measured window, 273,139 transactions were taken into ledgers. Of those, 211,994 succeeded and 61,145 failed, a failure rate of 22.4 percent. That sounds like a broken network, and it is not one.
A failed transaction on Stellar is one that was taken in and executed, but whose condition was not met. The typical case is trading on the network's own order book function: one program bids on a price difference, a faster program got there first, and the transaction runs into nothing. Of the 2,000 transactions we examined individually, 303 had failed, and the operation types over the same period consist half of contract calls and just under a quarter of buy and sell offers. For an ordinary payment from address to address none of this matters.
There is one thing you should take away from it, and we checked it in every single case: all 303 failed transactions in our sample paid a fee, a median of 100 stroops. Stellar collects it as soon as the transaction has been taken into a ledger, whatever the outcome. Anyone who sends a payment on a tight balance or with a time condition loses the fee even when nothing arrives at the other end.
Stellar is often advertised with the line that a transaction costs 0.00001 XLM. That figure describes the base fee of 100 stroops per operation, which is the minimum price; a stroop is one ten-millionth of an XLM. Whether the minimum price also holds in practice can be measured.
It holds in the majority of cases. 57.2 percent of the 2,000 transactions we examined were settled at the minimum rate down to the last unit, meaning 100 stroops for every operation contained. The median across all transactions comes to 300 stroops, which is 0.00003 XLM or about 0.0006 euro cents. A thousand payments of that kind cost less than one cent together.
The distribution is heavily skewed, though, and the average is no use here: it sits at 9,343 stroops and so at thirty-one times the median. The top tenth pays from 13,952 stroops, the top percent from 132,571 stroops, and the most expensive case in the window cost 139,028 stroops, or around 0.28 euro cents. Almost all of these outliers are automated processes; ordinary transfers do not reach such levels.
A good one in five submitted transactions does not make it through, and pays its fee all the same.
Fee bidding is the procedure by which Stellar hands out space in a ledger. Every transaction names an upper limit that the sender is willing to pay at most. If all applicants fit into the ledger, they all pay the minimum rate. If there are more applicants than slots, the higher bids go first, and settlement follows the lowest bid still taken in. The rules for this are set out in Stellar's technical documentation.
Exactly this mechanism can be read off our figures. The median bid stood at 144,757 stroops, while the median amount settled was 300. Senders therefore offered around four hundred and eighty times what they paid in the end. Only 8.6 percent of transactions were actually settled at their own maximum bid.
For your own transfer that means two things. A high bid in the wallet does not make the payment more expensive; it protects against load spikes and nothing else. It gets critical the other way round with software that hard-codes the upper limit at a low level: payments like that drop out of the ledger during a spike. Anyone who buys XLM through an exchange and leaves it sitting there sees none of this, because the trading venue books internally; the fee question only comes up on withdrawal to an address of your own. Which venues offer what terms is set out in our crypto exchange comparison.
Since the European regulation on markets in crypto assets took effect, trading venues may serve retail clients in Germany only with an authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. The companies that BaFin lists are set out in its register of crypto institutions. Under the regulation XLM counts as a crypto asset with no issuer behind it and is traded by the large authorised venues; a delisting risk of the kind seen with some stablecoins does not apply here.
In practice you buy XLM in ordinary spot trading, against the euro or against an authorised stablecoin. Watch the spread and not the order fee alone, because with a coin turning over $814 million a day the spread is the bigger cost block at smaller venues. Anyone who comes in through a certificate or an exchange-traded product ends up holding a claim against an issuer and no coins, with a default risk of its own and a different tax treatment.
Gains from selling XLM count in Germany as private disposals under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Sell within a year of buying and the gain is taxable, charged at your personal income tax rate. Once a year has passed it stays tax free. The threshold for all private disposals in one year is €1,000; once it is exceeded, the entire gain is taxable and not merely the part above it.
A price rise of eight percent in a day shortens no deadline. Anyone taking profits after the jump should look up first when the individual lots were bought, because a sale a few weeks before the one-year mark can turn out expensive. Where there were several purchases at different times, the first-in-first-out method applies per wallet or account.
One widespread expectation we will clear up here, because it leads to mistaken purchases again and again: XLM cannot be staked. The Stellar Consensus Protocol works without any capital deposited. It is a voting model among validators who put nothing up and receive no reward for it either. A yield from the network itself does not exist on Stellar.
The earlier inflation of one percent a year, paid out to wallet addresses, was switched off by the validators in October 2019. In November 2019, 55.5 billion XLM were destroyed, and the total supply has stood at 50 billion since then. So when a platform offers you a yield on XLM, it does not come from the network but from that platform's own business: from lending, from trading or from a bonus programme. What you carry with it is counterparty risk, not protocol risk.
Two particulars apply to custody on Stellar. Every address must first hold a minimum reserve that stays tied up in the network and cannot be paid out; it rises with every additional entry, such as one further token held. Second, many exchanges ask for a memo on deposits, an extra identifier alongside the address. A transfer without that memo lands in a collective account and has to be assigned by hand.
On an exchange the coins sit in the provider's holdings, with its insolvency and attack risk. A software wallet on your phone suits the amounts you move day to day. For holdings meant to sit until the one-year mark has passed, the way leads to a device that the private key never leaves. The minimum reserve applies just the same in both cases.
The price jump is the occasion, the network figures are the finding. Three steps follow from them.
(As of September 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
