Stellar is a decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money, in any pair of currencies, directly on the internet. Stellar enables users to transfer money on their network directly, without banks, and without fees. It was originally created by Jed McCaleb, the founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple.
Stellar has its own native coin called Lumens (XLM). All users must hold a minimum of 20 Lumens in order to ensure their authenticity and to maintain a wider distribution and free flow. Users must spend 0.00001 XLM in order to transfer fiat currencies. This provides the network with more liquidity for less popular currency pairs. Lumens are an inflationary currency with a fixed increase rate of 1% per year.
The network uses the Stellar Lumens Consensus Protocol (SCP). Unlike PoW or PoS consensus mechanisms, SCP relies on a Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA), in which specific groups of nodes are chosen to arrive at transaction agreement. This provides the Stellar network with more decentralized control.
Lightyear.io, a for-profit entity of Stellar, was launched in 2017 as the commercial arm of the company.

Bitcoin Diamond is a hardfork of Bitcoin that was created in 2017. Although the network's code preserves much of Bitcoin's original features, it aims to improve transaction speeds by implementing the Lightning network and increasing the storage capabilities of each block. The Lightning Network is a second layer payment protocol that works on the Bitcoin blockchain and is designed to place a large portion of the transaction data outside of the blockchain.

Quantum Resistant Ledger is developing an enterprise blockchain platform that is designed to be secure against an attack from quantum computers. The Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL) implements a more secure type of cryptographic signatures call XMSS. The network has a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.