Rivers, not vaults

You already dissected a plain payment: one asset, A to B, final in ~5 seconds. That is a canal — straight, useful, boring.

The interesting part is that Stellar's ledger is not just a vault of balances. It carries a full currency exchange inside the protocol: order books, liquidity pools, and payment operations that trade while they travel.

No external exchange, no bridge, no wrapped detour — conversion is a native power of the ledger. This chapter follows the water: first the offers, then the pools, then the operation that makes remittances feel like magic.