Stellar Lumens (XLM) is an open-source distributed payments infrastructure. It is a leapfrog technology that connects people, payment systems, and banks with a focus on the developing world. It enables fast and reliable facilitation of transactions across multiple currencies and assets using the Lumens (XLM) cryptoasset as a bridge.

The core function of Stellar is similar to the underlying technology of most decentralized cryptocurrency projects. It runs a network of decentralized servers with a distributed ledger that is updated every 2-5 seconds across all nodes. The most notable distinguishing factor between Stellar Lumens and Bitcoin is its consensus protocol.

Stellar's consensus protocol does not rely on the entire network of miners to approve transactions. Instead, it uses the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) algorithm, which allows transactions to be processed faster. This is because it uses quorum slices (or part of the network) to approve and verify a transaction.

Each node of the Stellar network selects its own set of "trusted" nodes. Once a transaction is approved by all nodes in this set, it is considered approved. The accelerated process has made the Stellar network extremely fast, allowing it to process up to 1,000 network operations per second.