This week’s main headline was taken by Stellar Lumens [XLM], the eighth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, with news of its listing on Coinbase.com and its collaboration with IBM, a multinational information tech company. Stellar and IBM announced the launch of World Wire, which is going to focus on cross-border, real-time transaction settlement. The solution will be introduced in over 50 countries and will be supported by the Stellar protocol.
Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of Stellar.org, spoke about IBM World Wire in an interview session at the Money 20/20 conference. He also spoke about the impact it would have on the US markets in particular and his opinion on stablecoins.
On IBM World Wire, he stated that this product allows banks and financial institutions to issue digital assets on a common platform “that can be interchanged between each other”. He further stated that it allows users to send currency A, which can later be converted to currency B, enabling a “much more seamless” way than the traditional means around the globe.
McCaleb also spoke about the impact World Wire would have on the US market. He said:
“So, I mean, for a common person in the U.S, its not that impactful but for anyone that does a lot of international transfers, like maybe have a relative overseas, then it will matter a lot”
This was followed by McCaleb speaking about stablecoins, taking into consideration Facebook’s recent announcement of launching one. On this, McCaleb stated that he preferred the terms “fiat token” over “stable coin” as there were a lot of currencies involved, and “maybe they were not so stable”. He added,
“[…] the future will be this world where people are using digital representations of value whether its fiat currencies or gold […], it should all be kind of tokenized. […] [this] gives you all kind of the power benefits that cryptocurrencies has […] and everything is interoperable. So, its just a much better state-of-affairs than what we have today.”
Furthermore, McCaleb also spoke about the big challenge they faced and what he was “most concerned” about in the financial services for 2019. He stated that creating this [World Wire] network was their big challenge, adding that IBM was a great partner in this regard. He said,
“What they [IBM] are doing is bringing a whole collision of people together in one swoop rather than trying to do it just one-off because none of these attempts really work if you just have one or two players, you really need a lot of participants to start to see the benefits of an open-network like Stellar.”
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Published at Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:07:32 +0000
