MoneyGram officially moves forward with Ripple.
This week, the payments giant announced a new partnership with the Stellar Development Fund to use the Stellar blockchain, a competitor of Ripple Labs, to facilitate cross-border payments .
MoneyGram payments on the Stellar blockchain will use the world’s 2nd-greatest stablecoin, Circle’s USD Coin (USDC).
According to the payments giant, USDC will allow payments with MoneyGram in “near real time” for the 1st time.
MoneyGram President and CEO, Alex Holmes explains:
“As cryptocurrencies and digital currencies become increasingly important, we are particularly optimistic about the potential of stablecoins as a method of streamlining cross-border payments.”
Stellar XLM’s native asset is trading at $.349708 at press time, up six.five% on the day and nearly 29% in excess of the previous week, in accordance to CoinGekko.
Ripple and MoneyGram partnered in June 2019 for foreign exchange and cross-border payments.
As element of that deal, Ripple committed $50 million to MoneyGram, which it finished in November 2019.
However, the payment giant prohibit the use of XRP payments final February following the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit towards Ripple.
The SEC filed a lawsuit towards Ripple Labs in late December, claiming that XRP is a safety and alleging that Ripple Labs illegally offered massive quantities of crypto assets with no complying with laws.
In February, Holmes mentioned MoneyGram was following the SEC situation and had suspended the use of Ripple’s XRP-powered cross-border payments merchandise, Liquidity on Demand, out of “extreme caution” “. The CEO also mentioned the firm hopes to carry on collaborating with Ripple in the potential.
Ripple’s lawsuit with the SEC is nevertheless ongoing.
Don’t miss a beat – Sign up to get crypto e mail alerts straight to your inbox
Follow us at Twitter, Facebook and Telegram
Surfing Hodl mixture day by day
Featured photograph: Shutterstock / Dmitriy Rybin