XLM Skyrockets To A Two-Year High As Stellar Announced Major Protocol Upgrade

Stellar, the popular blockchain project enabling cross-border transactions between various currency pairs, announced a significant protocol upgrade yesterday. Apart from providing new features, the native cryptocurrency XLM has reacted with a massive price boost a day later.

Protocol 15 Upgrade On The Stellar Blockchain

The Stellar network connects banks, payment systems, and customers to facilitate low-cost, cross-asset transfers of value through its blockchain. Stellar was unable to proceed with its latest network upgrade called Protocol 14 as the developer team discovered a bug during the trials.

However, Stellar’s Head of Ecosystem, Justin Rice, published a Medium post yesterday, confirming the successful completion of the Protocol 15 update.

The latest upgrade has introduced two new features – Claimable Balances and Sponsored Reserves. Both have already been deployed on the testnet and aim to “make it easier than ever to build user-friendly apps on Stellar.”

The Claimable Balances is a new ledger entry allowing payments to be split into two separate parts – the creation of a balance and the claiming of a balance.

On the other hand, the Sponsored Reserves will allow users to pay the base reserves for other accounts without giving over control of the underlying funds. Additionally, this feature adds “new extensions to account entries and ledger entries to record pertinent information about sponsorships.”

Rice outlined that some users may experience errors at first following the Protocol 15 upgrade. However, they can fix the issues by simply updating the software to support it.

XLM Price Responds In Fashion

Stellar’s native cryptocurrency is called Lumens and goes under the ticker XLM. Its price reacted to the aforementioned news with a significant price boost.

XLM traded around $0.11 on November 23rd but enjoyed today’s massive gains with a surge to $0.19 (on Binance). Although the asset has retraced to $0.16 as of writing these lines, this is still a 50% daily increase. On a weekly scale, XLM has gained nearly 100%.

By reaching $0.19, XLM broke its previously yearly high. Moreover, this impressive price tag is now the highest level registered since precisely two years ago – in November 2018.