Six global banks have reported signed letters of intent to issue their own stablecoins backed by their national fiat currencies on IBM’s now-live blockchain-powered payments network, “World Wire”. The news was jointly announced by IBM and Stellar during a keynote at the Singapore event Money 2020 according to reports.
IBM’s cross-border payment network, Blockchain World Wire was launched in collaboration with Stellar in September last year. Blockchain World Wire went live yesterday (18th March) and apparently more than 40 banks are on service which should leverage cryptocurrencies to enable near real-time international settlements between banks.
According to reports, six banks have confirmed their intent to issue stablecoins backed by their national fiat currencies on BWW which included Banco Bradesco from Brazil, South Korea’s Bank Busan and the Phillippines Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation.
Jesse Lund, the head of blockchain solutions at IBM has revealed that other banks, which has yet to be disclosed, will reportedly issue stablecoins that are going to be tied to the euro and Indonesian rupiah.
Ahead of the announcement, IBM has also made a new partnership with the Stellar based, Stronghold in order to create the Stellar network’s very first stablecoin.
The blockchain solution head has stated that IBM plans to expand its blockchain-powered settlement network with further assets saying:
"We let the market drive the expansion and selection of the network incrementally. We are really feeling excited that we are on a roll to build something new and revolutionary that's really going to change the landscape of cross-border payments."
BWW currently supports almost 50 currencies in more than 70 countries around the world.it disintermediates legacy bank settlement systems by bringing in the XLM token as an effective tracked settlement tool for fiat currencies between institutional parties.
IBM doesn’t issue the settlement asset chosen between parties as Lund sat down in an interview to make it clear that “our view for stablecoins is really that they should be more broadly accessible and what World Wire seeks to do is to provide fungibility of digital assets across financial institutions.”
In terms of price, Stellar is performing quite well on the day. The cryptocurrency is priced at $0.11 following a 5.15 percent increase over the past 24 hours.
