Stellar Lumen up by 120% following protocol 15 upgrade

Stellar Lumen (XLM) price is up by 120% over the past seven days following the protocol 15 upgrade earlier this week

Stellar Lumen has been one of the best performing digital currencies over the past week. The price of Stellar Lumen is up by nearly 8% over the past 24 hours and 120% in the past week, making it the best performer amongst the leading cryptocurrencies.

XLM was trading at $0.08 per coin last week. However, it has surged since then and reached the $0.2 mark before dropping earlier today to now trade at $0.18 per coin. This massive price rise represents a 120% increase in value in a week. As such, it outperformed every other major cryptocurrency, including XRP that recorded a 115% growth in the past week.

This week’s rally is the first time XLM is reaching the $0.2 mark since September. The XLM price action followed an announcement by the project developers earlier this week. The project developers announced that a new version of the Stellar public network protocol had been approved and implemented by the validators.

The validators implemented the new Protocol 15 upgrade on 23 November, and it introduces two new features. According to the blog post, the two new features, Claimable Balances and Sponsored Reserves, make it easier to build user-friendly apps on Stellar. The team revealed that it had seen the two features in action during the testnet stage and are excited to see how developers on the Stellar network would work with them.

The features also retain the network’s defence against “farm attacks” and other methods that hackers might use to attack the blockchain.

Stellar has been one of the underperforming cryptocurrencies amongst the major coins for over a year now. The XLM price has been subdued despite Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies rallying in recent weeks. However, XLM came alive on 21 November when its trading volume started to accumulate. XLM has more than doubled its value since then and leads the top 100 coins by market cap in weekly gains.

XRP and XLM set market trend

XRP and XLM have been the standout cryptocurrencies this week. It is exciting because XLM was initially forked from XRP by Jed McCaleb and launched in July 2014. Stellar Lumen has a similar function as XRP as it seeks to reduce the cost of cross-border payments using blockchain. Both cryptocurrencies have gained more than 100% in value over the past week, outperforming Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and every other major cryptocurrency.