Altcoin News: Wells Fargo Will Release Its Own Digital Currency

September 17, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

The American financial giant Wells Fargo plans to launch its own digital currency called Wells Fargo Digital Cash and develop a separate blockchain platform for it.

As the company explained this Tuesday, the motivation to launch the project was the desire to increase operational efficiency. The digital currency will take the form of a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Initially, it will be used for internal settlements in company divisions. Wells Fargo’s international business units also use stablecoin to transfer funds between themselves.

“As a result of the increasing digitization of banking services globally, we see a growing demand to further reduce friction regarding traditional borders, and today’s technology puts us in a strong position to do that,” said Lisa Frazier, head of the Wells Fargo innovation group.

The bank’s own platform based on distributed registry technology will allow it to transfer money “almost in real-time, without affecting the accounts used, transactions or the infrastructure for their coordination.” In addition, the company’s international branches will be able to make money transfers outside normal business hours, avoid the need to seek the help of intermediaries and reduce the time and costs associated with such transactions.

The launch of the project is planned for next year. In the process, new currencies will be connected to the tests.

“We believe DLT holds promise for a variety of use cases, and we’re energized to take this significant step in applying the technology to banking in a material and scalable way. Wells Fargo Digital Cash has the potential to enable Wells Fargo to remove barriers to real-time financial interactions across multiple accounts in multiple marketplaces around the world,” Frazier added.

In July 2018, Wells Fargo filed a patent application to register a confidential data tokenization system. The company expects to use its new blockchain platform to solve a variety of tasks, in addition to releasing stablecoins.

Author: Marko Vidrih