Stellar

Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) — a federated Byzantine agreement model where each validator selects its own quorum slices from the shared validator set, rather than a fixed global validator list. Ledgers close roughly every 5 seconds.

Public and permissionless for users and developers. Validator participation is open; each node operator chooses its own trusted quorum.

Soroban — Stellar's Rust/WASM smart contract platform — alongside native transaction operations (payments, offers, path payments, AMMs) that don't require a contract at all.

Rust, compiled to WASM, via Soroban. Most payment and DEX activity uses native transaction types instead of contracts.

Not by default. Stellar is a public ledger where transactions, balances, and account state are visible onchain.

Public by default. Transactions and ledger objects are queryable through public RPC endpoints and the stellar.expert explorer.

Validators agree on a transaction set through SCP at each ledger close (~5 seconds). There is no priority-fee auction in the Ethereum sense — fees are a flat network minimum that can rise only under sustained congestion.