The Stellar Foundation is a non-profit blockchain project that built the Stellar network. The Stellar ecosystem holds the digital token Stellar (XLM), or Stellar Lumens.

The for-profit subsidiary of the Stellar Foundation, Lightyear, purchased Chain for around $40 million. As part of the all-cash deal, all of Chain’s existing investors, such as Citi Ventures, Visa, and NASdaq will all receive a return on their initial investment, Chain’s co-founder, ADAm Ludwin, told Forbes.

“All of the clients that we have now have effectively shifted from using a traditional database model to using a tokens model, issuing assets on a local environment,” said Ludwin, who is CEO of the newly formed Interstellar. “By partnering with Stellar you can fire an asset to another institution.”

Interstellar

Lightyear and Chain will both be retired, and Interstellar will employ 60 individuals. Interstellar will headquarter in both San Francisco and New York City. Ludwin will be taking over as CEO of Interstellar and Stellar’s founder, Jed McCaleb, will become CTO of Interstellar.

Ludwin told Forbes that StellarX, the trading service created on the Stellar blockchain, will also move under the Interstellar umbrella. StellarX is anticipated to launch in just a few weeks.

StellarX states that it is a free, fast, and user-friendly peer-to-peer marketplace. Its website claims that it will hold every asset class imaginable such as cryptocurrencies, bonds, fiat, and commodities. StellarX is currently taking email addresses and will email individuals when the product is made available to the public.

Visa, NASdaq, and Citi

Last year, Visa announced that it launched the first phase of its B2B payment network that was powered by Chain. NASdaq and Citi also announced last year separate joint projects that focused on cross-border payments using Chain.