Stellar is a distributed ledger that has a native currency to make payments easier.
After reading up on Taler, it sounds like a very similar idea to Stellar, but Stellar removes some of the need for trusted authorities.
From the Taler overview: "The system requires an external auditor, such as a government-appointed financial regulatory body, to frequently verify the exchange's databases and check that its bank balance matches the total value of the remaining coins in circulation."
In Stellar, this service is provided by the ledger and the nodes that validate it.
There are other interesting features of the Stellar native currency such as providing a way to transparently convert between currencies when making a payment: https://www.stellar.org/how-it-works/stellar-basics/explaine...