Austin Rice and Marta Lakova from the Stellar Development Foundation deliver a technical deep dive into how Stellar works, comparing its federated Byzantine agreement consensus to Bitcoin and Ethereum's proof of work, then demonstrate asset issuance on the Stellar testnet using Stellar Laboratory.
In this technical presentation, VP of Ecosystem Austin Rice and Stellar Core engineer Marta Lakova explain the Stellar network architecture, consensus mechanism, and developer tools. They cover how Stellar nodes maintain a distributed ledger, compare Stellar's federated Byzantine agreement (which prioritizes safety and finality) to Bitcoin's and Ethereum's proof of work systems (which prioritize liveness), and discuss the governance processes for protocol changes via Core Advancement Proposals and Stellar Ecosystem Proposals. The presentation includes a live demonstration of issuing a custom asset on the Stellar testnet using Stellar Laboratory, showing how to create accounts, establish trust, and make payments. They also introduce Stellar Quest, a gamified learning platform for developers.