Overview

The Stellar Developer Documentation is the official technical reference for the Stellar network, published by the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF). The “fundamentals” section teaches the core concepts underlying the network: the Stellar stack and its architecture, accounts, transactions and operations, ledgers, assets (including the native lumen, XLM), fees and resource metering, and the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP). It builds foundational knowledge for developers integrating with or building on Stellar, and links out to ecosystem standards (SEPs) and smart-contract functionality.

Key points

• Accounts are the central data structure holding balances, signers, and sequence numbers; every account is funded with and holds lumens (XLM), the native asset used to pay fees and satisfy minimum balances.
• Operations are the individual actions that mutate ledger state (for example payments and asset issuance); a transaction bundles one or more operations, is signed, and either fully succeeds or fully fails.
• The ledger is the record of the network’s state at a point in time; a new ledger is produced roughly every few seconds as validators reach agreement, forming an append-only chain of ledger entries.
• The Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) is a Federated Byzantine Agreement system: validators choose their own trusted quorum sets, and the network reaches agreement without proof-of-work mining or a fixed global validator set.
• Assets other than lumens are issued by accounts and held via trustlines; the built-in decentralized exchange and liquidity pools support on-chain trading and swaps.
• Fees, resource limits, and metering govern transaction cost and computational load, and Stellar Ecosystem Proposals (SEPs) define interoperability standards across the ecosystem.

Relevance to Truestamp

Stellar is one of the public blockchains to which Truestamp records block hashes, and this documentation is cited in the Truestamp whitepaper. The account, transaction, and ledger model described here is what makes a Truestamp block commitment on Stellar publicly independently verifiable, and Stellar ledger data also serves as one of Truestamp’s external entropy sources.

Citations

1. Stellar Developer Documentation. Stellar Development Foundation. Official developer documentation for the Stellar network: accounts, transactions and operations, ledgers, assets, and the Stellar Consensus Protocol. Accessed 2026-07-21.