Note: This is just my opinion so don't take it as investment advice.

As we all know, Stellar has increased quite a lot lately. I'm going to put a lot of links in this post to back up each point by the way, hopefully it's not annoying! So let's take a look to see where we currently stand:

IBM

Stripe got on board with Stellar in the early days which was impressive enough, but the partnerships are still rolling in now. Over the last few months we learned that IBM are getting involved which is a very good vote of confidence for the Stellar team. It's not every day that a Fortune 500 company gets involved with cryptocurrency.

It's cheap

This might sound ridiculous, but psychologically people feel strange purchasing 0.001 of something for example. At the moment Stellar is the cheapest coin in the top 20 on Coin Market Cap. With more and more people wanting to get involved with cryptocurrency (including those who want to only put in a small amount) Stellar seems cheap. Sure, there are other "cheap" coins but when you look at the likes of Ripple vs Stellar it's clear that there's a lot more value in Stellar.

Big ICO's are only beginning to use Stellar

Very few coins allow you to run your own ICO on them, but Stellar makes it easy, quick and cheap. Mobius just finished their pre-sale today which allowed you to pay via many different coins. They raised $30,000,000 and was more or less an invite only system - but this is where it gets interesting; in an email send to all the pre-sale contributors the following was included:

Our public sale will only accept Stellar Lumens (XLM).

Once the public sale starts, people will need to buy lumens to take part in the ICO. Mobius isn't a small company either, they have Jed (the creator of Stellar) on board with them!

FairX

One thing that's awful about cryptocurrency is going from fiat to cryptocurrency or vice versa. FairX recently announced that they are going to solve this problem by...you guessed it - using Stellar. They said they will:

be using the stellar distributed exchange heavily"

To learn more about FairX read this on Reddit.

Stellar will have it's own StackExchange

At first this might seem like it won't have a big impact, but remember that developers have a big impact on cryptocurrency for obvious reasons. The Stellar team are working hard to get a Stack Exchange created just for Stellar so developers can easily get any questions answered that they have about it which will help adoption. So far it's close to reaching the beta stage!

Adoption

You've probably noticed it on this forum along with the likes of Reddit (I know I have - getting almost too much traffic on the forum lately, hopefully the server doesn't crash any time soon :blush:), adoption is picking up faster than ever. It's no surprise when we're getting more and more media attention such as:

CNBC - There's a new hottest cryptocurrency of 2018 so far: stellar

Forbes - Crypto Watch: Stellar Lumens (XLM) Price Rockets 54% In 16 Hours, Overtaking EOS And NEO

NASDAQ - Look Out Bitcoin, Here Come Cardano and Stellar

Fortune - IBM and Stellar Are Launching Blockchain Banking Across Multiple Countries

It...actually works

Last but definitely not least, when you send lumens it's instant and cheap (almost free to be honest). Something that's sadly getting increasingly rare lately.

Hopefully this post helps a few people learn about Stellar :slight_smile: