Title

Interstellar™ - Wallet and Exchange

Summary:

A powerful, feature rich and multi-platform non-custodial wallet and exchange app built on Stellar and serving hundreds of thousands of Stellar users since 2017.

Category:

Applications, Tools & Infrastructure

Goals:

To continue to build the most inclusive and diverse wallet, exchange and DeFi app serving the amazing Stellar ecosystem, especially in emerging markets where financial inclusion is a major challenge.

Description:

The Interstellar platform is a 3-year-old non-custodial wallet and exchange, an asset issuer (6 top assets), a tool (multisigPlus coordinator) and a service provider (KYCPlus, fiatanchor.io and cryptoanchor.io) all built on Stellar.

Our current release is version 4.0 and we will be releasing our latest and greatest version 4.5 in a few weeks, built on the latest Stellar Core 13.x and Stellar Horizon 1.x. The Interstellar app also had a dedicated testnet version over the last 3 years.

Interstellar Versions Release Timeline

Version 1.0 - Big Bang - September 2017
Version 2.0 - Proxima Centauri - May 2018
Version 3.0 - Sirius - September 2018
Version 3.5 - Pathfinder - December 2018
Version 3.6 - Vega - March 2019
Version 4.0 - Voyager - November 2019
Version 4.5 - (Supernova) – Coming soon, July 2020

We will dive deeper into our description with a bit of history so you can better understand what our project has been doing for the last 3 years and why Interstellar is valuable for Stellar.

The Interstellar app has its humble beginnings in the spring of 2017 in a country in Central Africa called Cameroon (Trivia: We have some of the best soccer players in the world). We've been involved with blockchain technology since 2010 and we were early adopters of projects such as Bitcoin, Peercoin, Feathercoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Ripple and Darkcoin (Dash). However, it was only with the arrival of Stellar that we saw the potential for blockchain/DLT to truly address many of the financial inclusion challenges faced in Cameroon and other developing nations, especially in Africa. It did not take us long to realise that Stellar was an equalizer, and after many months of reading, research, and planning, we decided to build on Stellar.

We would also like to preface this submission by stating that in the past some users have confused us with Inter/stellar, the company created from the merger between Lightyear and Chain in September 2018. Our Interstellar which was launched before in 2017 is not in any way affiliated with Inter/stellar. The only thing we have in common is the passion to build kickass apps and services for the advancement of the Stellar ecosystem.

When we first introduced our Interstellar app to the Stellar community on October 24th, 2017, we only had a web app and a few hundred users (https://galactictalk.org/d/501-introducing-interstellar). Our app was well received by the community which motivated us to apply for our first Stellar Build Challenge (SBC5). We were among the winners selected for SBC5 and because of this recognition by the SDF and the larger ecosystem, we committed ourselves to help the Stellar ecosystem grow globally.

We received 410,345 XLM as our award. (Another trivia: The SDF actually sent us twice the amount in error, 820,690 XLM, so we promptly refunded 410,345 XLM when we were contacted about the error. Proof)

One of the first things we did after receiving the award was to airdrop some of the lumens to over 1,500 Africans via a Telegram campaign in March 2018 to help them activate their Stellar wallets and learn more about the Stellar ecosystem. We also used some lumens to sponsor blockchain and Stellar training events in Cameroon and Nigeria. Since the 2017 SBC5, we have not applied for any SBC or SCF despite the many challenges faced when building and maintaining a large app like ours. Finally we used a significant portion of the lumens to provide liquidity for our six Stellar assets (fiat and crypto) since 2017 which all rank among the top Stellar assets issued today.

Some of you may ask, “Why apply now for the SCF?”.

Let's start with our numbers and milestones as of June 16th, 2020.

Please note that our milestones and achievements were achieved without any external financial resources for core development, marketing, advertising, or business development. We've been self-funded for more than 3 years now despite the many financial challenges we have faced to keep this project going.

Total Users: Over 250,000
Total Countries: 188

Our Top 10 Countries (Last 12 Months)

Bangladesh, 12.10%
Indonesia, 11.56%
Russia, 9.70%
United States, 7.83%
Ukraine, 5.77%
Vietnam, 4.64%
Venezuela, 4.12%
Nigeria, 3.56%
India, 2.66%
United Kingdom, 2.62%

Language Translations: 15. English, French, Spanish, Indonesian, French, Filipino, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi. More are coming. Anyone fluent in Vulcan or Klingon?
Total Anchored Assets: Six (6). We have been a major Stellar asset issuer and anchor since November 2017. One stable coin (XAF), and 5 cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, XRP, XRP, LTC, BCH). Our stable coin (XAF - https://xafx.org) serves six central African nations (Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon). Our five crypto assets (BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC, and BCH) consistently rank among the top and most actively used assets out of the 7,800+ assets within the Stellar ecosystem (https://stellar.expert/explorer/public/asset). All our assets support SEP6, including deposit and withdrawals history.
Platform availability:
Monthly Unique Registrations in 2020:
- Jan: 14,052
- Feb: 16,072
- Mar: 17,115
- Apr: 18,126
- May: 16,643
- Jun: 19,447 (As of June 16th, 2020)

Who We Serve

In addition to our hundreds of thousands of users, there are many successful projects on Stellar that depend(ed) on our Interstellar app infrastructure and workflows, and that is principally because we have a more inclusive and global approach to decentralized finance. Some of the Stellar-built popular companies and projects supported directly and indirectly by the Interstellar app both in the past and present include: GiveDirect.io, TheFutbolApp, DSTOQ, Bitbond, Diruna, KuBitX, Cowrie Integrated Systems (NGNT) and thewhitewallet.com (WSD), tree3.network (PEDITY), Frasindo, Ludum.

Building a full featured cross-platform wallet/dex on Stellar is always the easiest part. We can thank Stellar's excellent documentation for that. However, maintaining a Stellar wallet/dex over time, actively supporting users daily, especially as long as we have without any funding or grants, is where most Stellar projects run out of steam. Many Stellar apps have come and gone, because everyone eventually realizes that maintaining a popular cross-platform wallet/dex is a lot of hard work and requires a lot of time and money. The SDF continues to improve Stellar at a rapid pace, and we have to keep up with these releases since our app is a popular entry point for many international Stellar users and projects.

Key Interstellar Suite of Apps and Features

Interstellar Wallet: A highly secure non-custodial P2P mobile, web and desktop wallet application for real-time national and global payments using any digital currency or asset. It also provides detailed transaction history, send, receive, add/remove trust lines, backups, offline account viewer, real time alerts, notification sounds, multi-currency support with automatic price conversions. Additional support for Ledger Blue, Nano S and Nano X hardware wallets for added security. Trezor support coming soon, once we get our hands on it.
Interstellar Fiat/CryptoAnchor: An interoperability engine for linking legacy financial systems and other blockchains to Stellar. It allows you to seamlessly integrate with different blockchains, financial institutions, exchanges, and mobile money payment services. You can deposit and withdraw any of our digital currencies or assets without leaving the application or relying on third parties. We have successfully deployed and supported fiat stablecoins with financial institutions and payment service providers (TheWhiteWallet, Cowrie Integrated Systems, and KubitX) for USD, EUR, GBP, NGN, and XAF digital currencies and crypto currencies like BTC, LTC, XRP, LTC, ETH and BCH.

Interstellar Multi-Multisig:. Nope, it's not a typo. This is our multi-signature coordination solution which allows decision makers to digitally sign an unlimited number of pending transactions or documents at any time, and in any order. Hence we baptized it Multi-Multisig. Interstellar's Multi-Multisig engine has assisted thousands of Stellar projects and organizations all over the world, especially projects where decision makers are spread across multiple cities, continents, and time zones. It is an essential tool for governance, organizational management, legacy planning and a defense against multiple cyber security threats and hacking incidents.
Interstellar Exchange: The Interstellar exchange provides pellucid, convivial and advanced decentralized exchange trading user interfaces with full access to thousands of Stellar assets and markets. Some of our core Interstellar Exchange features are:
- Standard trading buy and sell forms, daily and hourly candlesticks, order books, wallet trading history, market trading history, candlesticks, RSI charts and MACD charts, 24hr Open, High, Low, Close data.
- We show you all popular trading pairs, with 24hour volume and 24hr price change percentages. Our raison d'être has always been to build a Stellar decentralized exchange, not an XLM decentralized exchange. That's why we also display trending non-XLM market pairs by default.
- Intelligent coin/market search feature which allows you to search assets by name, code or URL of the issuer.
- In addition to bar charts, we also support EMA12 and EMA26 indicators on our candlesticks and we also include separate RSI and MACD charts for the more serious traders amongst us.
Interstellar Federation Server: A dedicated solution for linking legacy financial/bank accounts and other services to Stellar. It provides an easy way for users to share financial institutions or mobile payment details by using a simple name or syntax that interoperates across different domains and providers. This mapping engine can perform both forward and reverse lookups for user and organizational accounts in banks, mobile money operators, payment services providers or other institutions in the financial services sector.
Interstellar KYCPlus: A Stellar-built identity and data management for KYC and AML. All documents and sensitive info are encrypted on your device using your public keys and can ONLY be accessed via our service with your private keys. Even though your KYC/AML data is encrypted locally on your device, we also store your encrypted data on our remote servers for backup. This is mainly for your convenience in case your device gets stolen, or you need to sync across multiple devices. Your encrypted data is not at risk on our servers because we do not know your private key(s). The best part about our KYC implementation is that you get to pick and choose what you share with third parties like an à la carte menu.
Interstellar Swap: One of the most unique features within the Interstellar suite of applications is the Pathfinder or the digital asset swap engine released in the fall of 2018. The PathFinder swap feature allows you to swap one crypto asset for another, even when a direct market between both coins doesn’t exist, i.e. to swap from BTC to ETH, PathFinder might swap from BTC to XLM first, and then from XLM to ETH. It does this automatically. Even if a direct market existed between BTC to ETH, PathFinder might still go from BTC through XLM to ETH in a scenario where there isn’t enough liquidity for your swap from BTC to ETH, or if the spread in the direct BTC to ETH market is too high. The Pathfinder works in real time to always find the best path in the SDEX from one crypto asset to another.

Key Events and Achievements

December 2017 - SBC5 award winner
September 2018 – Winner, Best digital innovation in Africa at 2018 WBAF-UAMDC AFRICA EXCELLENCE AWARDS in Accra, Ghana
October 2018 – Finalist out of 300 applicants for the best Blockchain Technology in Africa Award at the 4th AppsAfrica.com Innovation Awards in Cape Town, South Africa.
December 2018 – Granted “Interstellar” trademark by the African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI.int) for blockchain/DLT technology category.
December 2018 – Interstellar’s pathfinder technology is the main feature at CryptoBriefing - Why 2019 Could Be A Stellar Year.
April 2019 - Invited to demo our app at the International Finance Corporation/World bank head office in Singapore as a tool for financial inclusion.
May 2019 - Invited to join ASEAN Financial Innovation Network’s APIX Innovation Sandbox. APIX is an Asian Innovation Sandbox and cross border community of Banks, FinTechs and Financial Institutions partnering to create disruptive technologies.
June 2019 – Invited to speak on three panels at the 2019 United Nations Blockchain for Impact Summit at the UN headquarters in New York. Topics included the Interstellar app, “Africa Rising: The Next Blockchain Frontier”, and “Blockchain and Impact: Moving Beyond the Hype”.
July 2019 - Invited to attend BrettonWoods75, the 75th Anniversary of the Bretton Woods Conference at the historic Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods.
November 2019 - Invited to speak at Meridian, the first global Stellar blockchain conference organized by the SDF at Proyecto Público Prim in Mexico City. The talk was “Notes from Abroad: Digital Adoption in Cash Economies.”

Tags:

interstellar, wallet, exchange, multisig, anchors, swap, inclusion, tool, pathfinder, fiatanchor, cryptoanchor

Anything Else?

Oh yes, there's one last thing.

We would like to say a big Thank You to the entire Stellar community for their continuous support and feedback these last 3 years. Expect more from us.