In 2014, Stellar raised $35 million in its initial token sale of its native token, XLM. Stellar’s supply is managed by the nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), which steers development of the protocol. When Stellar started, 100 billion XLMs were created with an annual inflation rate of 1 percent. The inflation rate has since been removed.
In 2019, Stellar burned, or removed, more than 50 percent of its supply, slashing its total supply cap to 50 billion. Prices jumped by more than 14% within an hour of the announcement, as the remaining tokens in circulation became scarcer.
XLM’s price hit an all-time high of $0.86 during the 2017 crypto bull run. In the following bear market, XLM’s price sank to a low of $0.03. Not long after bitcoin’s price hit a then-high of $63,500, XLM’s price reached another peak of $0.73 in May 2021.