Stellar (XLM), an open-source distributed payment infrastructure, is reportedly in talks to acquire Chain, a San Francisco-based startup company building blockchain products for the financial industry, for $500 million in Stellar’s digital currency Lumens.

According to a breaking report by Fortune, Stellar has been pursuing Chain as a potential integration into the blockchain project’s decentralized payments infrastructure. Chain’s flagship product is Sequence, a ledger-as-a-service that enables organizations to securely track and transfer balances in a token format.

While not much more is known at this time, this move by Stellar is likely an effort to begin building products designed to support asset-backed tokens, a popular area for the cryptocurrency industry moving forward. Chain previously raised more than $43 million in venture funding from major investors including Khosla Ventures, Nasdaq, Visa, and Citi Ventures.

Stellar has gained significant traction over the last year, largely due to its growing popularity as an alternative platform to Ethereum for ICOs.

In its current state, Ethereum’s average transaction confirmation time is around 10-15 minutes, whereas Stellar’s is three to five seconds. What’s more, Stellar’s protocol is able to conduct over 3,000 transactions per second compared to Ethereum’s seven per second.

No official announcements have been released by either company at this time.

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