IBM Just Got a Stablecoin to Play With

Stablecoin Stronghold launched on Tuesday as Stellar network’s first official, venture-backed USD anchor. The company announced this move in a blog post, adding that Stronghold recently entered collaborations with IBM, a tech giant, to explore uses for Stronghold USD within blockchain business networks on the IBM Blockchain platform.

The concept of the stablecoin is that the buyers of the coin will deposit greenbacks with the company’s partner bank, Nevada-based Prime Trust for Stronghold to issue the tokens based on a 1-to-1 ratio.

Reuters reports that Jesse Lund, IBM’s vice president of global blockchain, said that, “IBM will explore use cases with business networks that we have developed, as a user of the token. We see this as a way of bringing financial settlement into the transactional business network that we have been building.”

The blog post of Stellar goes on to add, “Partnering with IBM will let us experiment with new ways for financial institutions and other organizations to use the Stellar network for faster, safer, and more efficient global transactions.”

The post explains also why a stablecoin, of all things, was Stellar’s choice: because of lack of access, Stellar hasn’t seen the same rate of adoption as Bitcoin or Ethereum. “For Stellar to reach the next level, there needed to be a way for traders to buy XLM [Stellar token] with fiat-based credit cards and bank accounts,” the post reads, saying that an USD anchor would act as the bridge between existing currencies and the Stellar network – without going through Bitcoin or Ethereum first.