Overview

Stellar is an open-source distributed ledger that you can use as a backend to power various applications and services, such as wallets, payment apps, currency exchanges, micropayment services, platforms for in-game purchases, and more — check out projects being built on Stellar: Stellar Ecosystem Projects.

Stellar has built-in logic for key storage, creating accounts, signing transactions, tracking balances, and queries to the Stellar database, and anyone can use the network to issue, store, transfer, and trade assets.

This documentation includes sections on how to build applications without smart contracts with the Wallet SDK or the JS SDK, building with smart contracts with the dapp frontend tutorial, and all information regarding experimentation with smart wallets.

Anchors

Many Stellar assets connect to real-world currencies, and Stellar has open protocols for integrating deposits and withdrawals of these assets via the anchor network. Because of this, a Stellar-based application can take advantage of real banking rails and connect to real money.

Read more about anchors in our Anchors section.

Set up an anchor using the Anchor Platform.

Integrate MoneyGram Access into an existing application with the Integrate with MoneyGram Access tutorial.

Stellar Ecosystem Proposals (SEPs)

Stellar-based products and services interoperate by implementing various Stellar Ecosystem Proposals (SEPs), which are publicly created, open-source documents that live in a GitHub repository and define how asset issuers, anchors, wallets, and other service providers interact with each other.

As a wallet, the most important SEPs are SEP-24: Hosted Deposit and Withdrawal, and SEP-31: Cross Border Payments API, SEP-10: Stellar Authentication, SEP-12: KYC API, and SEP-38: Anchor RFQ API.