Stellar, a specialist in cryptocurrency payments, is linking to Polkadot and its sibling network Kusama via the recently constructed Spacewalk bridge. This will connect the two blockchain ecosystems with Stellar’s fiat on-ramps worldwide.
Pendulum, the winner of a recent Polkadot parachain auction, constructed a bridge to link decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and foreign exchange (forex) markets. The focus is particularly on emerging markets, where Stellar has established a presence and collaborated with cross-border payments provider MoneyGram since its inception in 2014.
Although the banking infrastructure for cryptocurrency in the United States has mostly been dismantled and experienced turbulence, experienced companies such as Stellar are still constructing vital infrastructure to fulfill this purpose in other locations.
According to Torsten Stüber, the co-founder and CTO of Pendulum, the Spacewalk bridge has been launched on Kusama, Polkadot’s test network and the version for Polkadot is expected to be available in one or two weeks.
Pendulum’s objective is to integrate traditional finance with DeFi, according to Stüber, who is also the CTO of SatoshiPay, a crypto micropayments company with a long history of developing on Stellar. Stüber emphasized that stablecoins or fiat tokens are the primary focus, and not necessarily Lumens, the Stellar network’s native cryptocurrency.
Stüber stated that Stellar has an excellent implementation of stablecoins and offers on-ramps and off-ramps for various fiat currencies in different countries. He further added that no other network currently has such a vast range of fiat currencies tokenized on its platform.
USDC will be the primary stablecoin moving across the Spacewalk bridge, and it is also the token Stellar connected with MoneyGram that the companies began deploying last year.
Also, various regional currency stablecoins will be available, according to Tomer Weller, vice president of products at the Stellar Development Foundation. Weller stated that this comprises tokenized Argentine pesos and Brazilian reals, as well as a Kenyan shilling, several other African stablecoins, and a few euro-based ones.
Weller explained that every MoneyGram agent worldwide serves as a gateway to the Stellar network. This implies that users can convert their Stellar assets to cash in over 300,000 locations globally. Furthermore, they can access and convert their cash to cryptocurrency, particularly stablecoins, in a smaller fraction of those locations, which they are gradually expanding to more countries.
