Altcoin News: IBM Wants to Develop the First Stablecoin on the Stellar Blockchain

March 16, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Jesse Lund, head of the blockchain department at IBM, has hinted that the company may also want to work on a stablecoin for international transactions. Just like JP Morgan actually. He says that this might just be an important development for the technology giant.

Lund: “market demand” is driving IBM to develop a stablecoin solution for financial institutions. “More than a few banks around the world […] see tremendous business benefit to issue stablecoins in their native fiat currency,” he said.

When asked how IBM’s solution compares to JPMorgan Chase’s forthcoming in-house, USD-backed “JPM Coin” stablecoin, Lund hinted that IBM’s solution would be “somewhere in between” JPM’s exclusive, closed network asset. He stated:

“It’s not a proprietary coin like JPMorgan’s solution, although I think what they’re doing makes a lot of sense for them. […] What JPM’s doing also adds tremendous validation to what we’re doing. But 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.”

Fungibility means interchangeability. This way Bitcoin is also fungible. It doesn’t matter which Bitcoin you pay with, one Bitcoin is worth as much as the other Bitcoin.

Collaboration with Stellar

“World Wire” refers to the collaboration of IBM and Stellar (XLM) and the use of the network’s native asset in the IBM cross-border payment network, Blockchain World Wire (BWW).

In addition to BWW, which wants to use cryptocurrency’s to enable international real-time settlements between banks, IBM also works with Stronghold. Stronghold is based on Stellar and together they want to develop the first stablecoin of the Stellar network.

Author: Marko Vidrih