Stellar fundamentally operates on the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), which represents a federated Byzantine agreement system that prioritizes safety and fault tolerance over liveness. The fundamental design allows open network membership where anyone can become a validator while maintaining security through user-defined trust relationships. Each validator selects quorum slices of other validators they trust, and network-wide quorums emerge from these individual trust decisions. The fundamental architecture enables fast, low-cost transactions with built-in decentralized exchange functionality. Stellar's approach to consensus avoids both the energy consumption of proof-of-work and the wealth concentration risks of proof-of-stake by relying on trust relationships and reputation rather than computational power or token ownership.

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