Frequently Asked Questions

The Stellar Development Foundation (“SDF”) is a non-stock, nonprofit corporation organized under the laws of Delaware.  SDF is not a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) organization and we don’t have plans to seek tax exempt status from the IRS.  As such, SDF pays taxes similar to a C corporation.‍

As a non-stock, non-profit, SDF does not have shareholders, so we are not motivated by profits, share value, or dividends.  Instead, we are driven by our mission: creating equitable access to the global financial system.  We dedicate all of our resources to supporting Stellar, building the ecosystem, and furthering this mission.  Our mandate details our progress towards reaching our goals.  

If you are making an ‘everyday’ transaction on the Stellar network using a popular Stellar wallet, forgetting the memo is no big deal; it’s optional. If you are sending (depositing) lumens to an exchange, forgetting the memo will generally lead to your exchange account not being credited with lumens. If this happens, it’s important that you contact the exchange you sent lumens to — SDF can not help you recover your lumens.

We suggest finding your transaction using the Payment Locator on Stellar.Expert and getting as many details as you can regarding the transaction. Reach out to the exchange’s support team with the transaction details, let them know that you forgot the memo, and see what they can do to help you identify your transaction.

Going forward, make sure to review the address you’re sending to, verify if you need to provide a memo, and check that you provide an appropriate fee. You should only send transactions after you have double checked all of this information and verified that it is correct. Remember, it’s never a bad idea to try sending a small amount of an asset before making any transaction.

Read more here.

Minimum balances help protect the network from spam account creation. You can create an account by funding it with at least 1 lumen. Each new held asset (trustline) requires an additional 0.5 lumen reserve. To add three different assets to an account, a user must have at least 2.5 lumens: 1 XLM account reserve + (0.5 XLM asset reserve * 3 assets) = 2.5 total reserve.

If you are having issues sending a transaction from your Ledger, please make sure that your Ledger and the Stellar app on the device is up to date. Also, consider sending the transaction in a different browser.

Stellar’s social media imposters are up to no good: many want to collect your private information and private keys to steal your identity, accounts, lumens, and other cryptocurrencies. We’ve spotted Stellar imposters on Slack, Telegram, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, and emails. We’d hate to see anyone in our community hurt by these people.

Here’s a quick guide to protect yourself from scammers and phishers when interacting with the Stellar Development Foundation team:

• The Stellar Development Foundation team will NEVER ask you for your private keys. We will NEVER ask you to deposit funds to any wallet address.
• Our official Twitter account is @StellarOrg (https://twitter.com/StellarOrg). Our official Facebook account is Stellar.org, @stellarfoundation (https://www.facebook.com/stellarfoundation/). Trust no others!
• Our official website is https://www.stellar.org/. When you want to visit the Stellar website, type https://www.stellar.org/ directly into the browser address bar and then bookmark the site. Only use the bookmark to visit the site. Always check the full URL before entering any personal information — make sure, for example, someone did not replace an “l” with an uppercase I!
• Our employees will email you from emails using the @stellar.org domain. Before sending private information, please reply to the email and wait for a response. This is to ensure that someone is not impersonating a @stellar.org email account.
• When in doubt, tweet at us (@StellarOrg) and we will instruct you whether a communication is trustworthy.
• All official partnerships and announcements are made on our Twitter and website — please do not fall for any third party rumors or speculation. If you see a reposted announcement in any other forum that does not contain a link to the original information on our website, it is fake. Only trust what you see on the http://www.stellar.org/ website.

Lastly, a few quick notes:

• Lumen giveaways have been completed. We do not plan on sponsoring another giveaway, except through verified partners such as Coinbase and Keybase. Please do not fall for social media posts that ask you to give personal information for free lumens.
• We may periodically offer 300 XLM giveaways to a small number of people who physically attend our meetup events, but the instructions to claim these lumens will be emailed out to participants from a stellar.org email address and will ask you to enter your information on an official https://www.stellar.org/ webpage.
• For those with a large quantity of lumens, we suggest that you explore storing your lumens in a Ledger Nano S, a hardware wallet: https://www.ledgerwallet.com/products/ledger-nano-s. Please make sure to follow all the instructions to ensure that your lumens are securely stored!

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To upgrade from the old network, log in here: https://launch.stellar.org/

No. 

The old Stellar network launched in July 2014. The node software (stellard) was a modified fork of the Ripple node software (rippled). The ledger was completely new and contained no history from Ripple’s network.

In September 2015 the current Stellar network was launched with a new consensus model (SCP) and software, stellar-core. stellar-core was written from scratch — it does not share any code with rippled. For more information, read these blog posts about why the Stellar network was relaunched:

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Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices
Stellar Consensus Protocol: Proof and Code