IBM Hints at Stablecoin Cross-Border Payments Solution for Financial Institutions

The head of blockchain solutions for IBM, Jesse Lund, has hinted that bank-targeted stablecoins will be a major forthcoming development for the tech giant’s blockchain-powered cross-border payments solution. Lund made his remarks during an interview on financial news channel Cheddar on March 15.

While more details are set to be imminently announced next week, Lund told Cheddar that “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.”

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

Alongside BWW, which aims to leverage cryptocurrencies to enable near real time international settlements between banks, IBM has also partnered with Stronghold, a Stellar-based asset, to create the Stellar network’s first stablecoin.

As Cointelegraph reported in February, Lund recently hinted at IBM’s interest in stablecoins as a vital aspect of innovating the cross-border payments landscape. Proposing that there should be an ecosystem of various digital assets that work as settlement instruments for cross-border payments, he suggested:

“It could be [...] XRP [...] it could be Bitcoin, but it would also probably include other instruments, like stablecoins, and even eventually soon — hopefully — central bank-issued digital currencies.”