Stellar Lumens investors are entering the new year with healthy portfolios and a positive outlook. The asset rose nearly 50% overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday, raising the price per Lumens to $0.83 at press time. Stellar Knocking on the Door of the Top 5 ClubThis recent surge in investor confidence slung Stellar Lumens to a $14,966,000,000 market cap, pushing aside Dash, Iota, NEM, and Litecoin to overtake the #6 spot on Coin Market Cap. Stellar Lumens has had a phenomenal run over the course of the holiday season. As of today, the cryptocurrency is up roughly 1000% from its $0.08 valuation at the beginning of the December. Throughout the month, it hit all time high after all time high, hitting its newest peak earlier today at $0.88. Like Ripple, Stellar Lumens is a remittance platform focusing on cross-border payments. They even have the same founder, Jed McCaleb, who left Ripple in 2013 to work on Stellar. The Stellar foundation runs as a non-profit, subsisting on its share of Lumens and donations. Reasons for the RiseAs we’ve seen with Ripple’s own recent popularity, cross-border payment platform cryptocurrencies are strong going into 2018. The use case alone has investors optimistic for their future, as such platforms streamline an otherwise painful process that involves bank transfers and currency exchange. Stellar Lumens is also newly listed on Korean exchange OKex. Stellar’s meteoric rise comes in the midst of Bitcoin’s faltering market dominance and a corresponding altcoin bull market, as well. While this is enough to explain why altcoins in general are in the green right now, it does not fully explain Stellar’s particularly impressive performance. FairX, however, might tell the other side of this story. FairX is building a cash to crypto exchange in the same vein as Coinbase. Difference being, FairX wants to offer a host of altcoins that Coinbase currently does not support. In a recent tweet, FairX revealed that they’ll “be using the #stellar distributed exchange heavily” to facilitate these cash to crypto trading pairs. This potentially means that, on top of FairX using Stellar’s platform, Lumens (XLM), Stellar’s coin, could be the exchange’s native currency to facilitate cross-asset trades. For now, we’re keeping things hush-hush until the product evolves to a point where we’re happy with it. In the meantime, a note: we’ll be using the #stellar distributed exchange heavily, and just opened our pull request to add our alpha test validator! https://t.co/4BPcfScqjU— fairx (@fairxio) December 29, 2017Currently, Stellar Lumens is partnered with Deloitte and IBM, and IBM is using Stellar’s platform to set up cross-border payments with international banks. Featured image from Shutterstock