Stellar Gains Traction as Protocol 23 Vote Looms and ETF Approval Sparks Optimism

With crypto markets yet to fully recover, Stellar’s native token, XLM, has drawn investor interest today, trading at around $0.3708 with a slight increase of 0.95% during the last 24 hours. The blockchain platform, which has been centred on cross-border payments and the tokenisation of real-world assets, is on the edge of massive changes as the last week of September approaches.

The trading volume of XLM is skyrocketing to 231.9 million, outperforming the overall market’s growth by 0.38 per cent, indicating a re-emerging trend of interest in altcoins as Bitcoin dominance stays under 58 per cent.

This recovery is on the background of the expectation of the Protocol 23 major upgrade of the Stellar network, which is currently scheduled to undergo a community vote as early as today.

Combined with new institutional support and strong collaboration announcements this month, Stellar is establishing itself as a leader in the battle to scale to a low-cost financial infrastructure. Analysts cite these catalysts as some of the factors that may lead to a potential breakout, and some predict that XLM may test $0.50 by the end of the month should the momentum continue to be strong.

Price Action: Stabilising Rise Amid Altcoin Rotation

The current price trend of Stellar is indicative of a wider altcoin season index that is on the rise to 76, and it shows a capital leakage out of Bitcoin to platforms such as XLM. The token has recovered after falling as much as 0.361 in September, registering a 1.7 per cent increase each week, compared to the 1 per cent increase in the global crypto market.

The most important indicators of this resilience are:

• 24-Hour Spike in volume: Up 52 per cent to $346 million, and turnover at 2.96 per cent of market cap, indicates increasing trader confidence.
• RSI Momentum: The Relative Strength Index has been reported to increase out of the oversold position (30) to a neutral position of 41.32, which indicates that there is still room to go up without being overbought in the short run.
• Support Levels: Above the crucial $0.35 level, which Ali Martinez and other technical traders have indicated is crucial to the triangle pattern breakout.

However, XLM has been able to sail through this volatility during the last week, which was related to the macroeconomic jitters, such as the U.S. Federal Reserve signals about interest rates. However, its performance, which increased 3.7 per cent in the last trading hours of September 29, shows strength in its underlying performance.

Market watchers credit this to the low transaction costs (down to 0.00001 XLM per transaction) and Proof-of-Agreement consensus of Stellar itself, making it efficient to process without requiring a comparable energy cost as Proof-of-Work systems do.

Upgrade 23: Game Changer in the Future

The centre of the current buzz is the upcoming rollout of Protocol 23, codenamed WHISK. This protocol left final testing on October 1. The upgrade will be a boost to the smart contract functionality of Stellar through the Soroban platform, which will resolve scalability bottlenecks that have historically afflicted DeFi applications.

The upgrade highlights are:

• Throughput Boost: Network capacity increases 5,000 transactions per second (TPS) by 40 per cent.
• Fee Reductions: Gas fees are reduced by about 40% and thus microtransactions become even more feasible when it comes to remittances and tokenised assets.
• Interoperability Improvements: Smooth integrations with the Ethereum and Solana worlds, attracting developers to hybrid DeFi integrations.

According to the Stellar Development Foundation, WHISK is compatible with institutional adoption trends in 2025, specifically in real-world assets (RWAs). A final vote on the mainnet deployment should go to the community by the end of today, and early polls have been overwhelmingly in favour. With a successful approval, implementation would be rolled out in a matter of weeks, which would likely trigger a price surge of up to 17-20 per cent traditional upgrade responses.

The development of Stellar highlights the fact that it is no longer a competitor of Ripple and is now a fully-fledged DeFi hub. The XLM network was introduced in 2014 as a fork of the Ripple protocol, and currently has more than 127 exchanges and 277 trading pairs with a circulating supply of 32 billion XLM out of 50 billion total.

The Institutional Adoption Expands with the ETF Nod and Visa Integration

September has been a tough month for institutional interest in Stellar, which was topped off by the ripple effects of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approval of the Hashdex Nasdaq Crypto Index US ETF yesterday. The expansion of the fund to incorporate XLM, in addition to XRP and Solana, was announced on September 25 and represents a milestone with the ability of traditional investors to be exposed to Stellar with no direct custody risks.

This ETF greenlight comes after July became the first ETF to be integrated with Visa, in which the payments giant integrated Stellar into its stablecoin settlement platform. The relocation of Visa facilitates quicker and less expensive cross-border transactions through the use of XLM as a medium through which multi-asset swaps are done. According to early metrics, on-chain volume has increased by 36 per cent since the partnership with anchors, or fiat on-ramps in the Stellar ecosystem, making millions of settlements each day.

Other more recent victories to support adoption:

• RWA Tokenisation Push: Stellar stated in April that it will have $3 billion of real-world assets added on-chain through partnerships with Paxos, Ondo Finance, Etherfuse, and SG Forge. Since Q2, Franklin Templeton has tokenised more than $100 million on Stellar in its 445 million tokenised U.S. Treasuries fund, which is live.
• Stablecoin Growth: The PayPal PYUSD stablecoin became operational on the Stellar system on September 18 and provides global businesses with new sources of capital and removes their dependence on unstable fiat rails.
• Latin American Growth: Latin America is home to the biggest digital asset platform, Mercado Bitcoin, which announced initiatives at the Stellar Meridian 2025 conference to launch $200 million tokenised assets to serve remittances to Brazil and other parts of the region.

These advancements put Stellar in the position to be a bridge between traditional finance and blockchain, and more than 1,500 DePIN (Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Network) projects already look at its network to implement in 2025.

Market Sentiment: Bullish Whispers Amid Guarded Good News

The current social media buzz and analyst discussion is on the bullish side, where X (formerly Twitter) is talking about how XLM is going to revolutionise remittances. The low cost required to activate an account in the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) (one XLM) has won over underserved African and Southeast Asian markets.

However, challenges persist:

• Rivalry: The competitors, such as Solana, have a higher TPS of up to 65,000, but with greater centralisation risks.
• Regulatory Hurdles: Although the SEC gave the nod to ETFs, the continued regulatory ambiguity in stablecoins may have an impact.
• Macro Pressures: Since bitcoin dominance is 57.84, a reversal would limit the gains of altcoins.

Nonetheless, on-chain indicators are very optimistic. Active addresses have increased 15 per cent month-on-month, and the flood-attack safeguards of the network through micro-fees keep it secure. Analysts predict that XLM will stabilise at 0.40-50 by the end of the year and will have 1.50-3.30 long-term targets in this current cycle, assuming RWA adoption accelerates.

In the Future: Can Stellar Reach $5 in 2025?

Stellar has a good Q4 ahead as September is traditionally the best quarter, with an average of 6.24% returns. The projections of price are also varied, but it is expected that the price will go down to between 0.48 and 0.60 by December, due to the rollout of Protocol 23 and ETF inflows. In the long term, by 2030, there are models that assume highs of 1.85, under the assumption that tokenised assets reach 10 trillion around the world.

To investors, the utility of XLM combined with undervaluation, where the price per share is a fraction of its all-time high of 2018 of $0.87, provides attractive entry points. Stellar, according to one trader, is not merely surviving 2025; it is doing so on actual utility.

Stellar is a tale of silent supremacy in a year where regulatory chill and technology improvements were made. The current small fluctuations could be the foreshadowing of a true explosion, which the market is receiving as the most powerful networks are built with bridges, rather than hype in crypto.