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MoneyGram will be a sort of super-anchor for Stellar. It now has about 50 anchors in places like Brazil, Nigeria, the Philippines and the U.S.īut most of the anchors on Stellar are regional players, and not all have physical cash-in or -out locations. In 2016, it launched its first anchors - a network of regulated financial institutions, money service businesses, stablecoin issuers and other providers of on-ramps and off-ramps. Stellar has seen payments grow more than 500% on its network over the past year, but it needs to increase access for retail users. With this product, users can bring fiat currency to a MoneyGram location, convert it to crypto and convert crypto back out to fiat. Mark Heynen, vice president of Business Development at Stellar Development Foundation, praised MoneyGram’s “ability to abstract out all the complexity.” MoneyGram has licenses and operations in 200 countries and territories, with more than 420,000 agent locations, which allowed for a relatively quick build. The product was built over the next several months, and a pilot began in November. In one key meeting last summer, Dixon told MoneyGram CEO Alex Holmes that “the thing that had been missed in a lot of different spaces is how much blockchain and crypto needs MoneyGram.”
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The companies started talking about this current product March 2021. MoneyGram and Stellar began talking in 2019, and the companies then built an “adapter” that showed it was possible for Stellar’s and MoneyGram’s systems to connect. Stablecoins are a really nice way for payments to be leveraged.”īringing together a traditional financial company with a newfangled blockchain group was not simple. “We don't prefer XLM over anything else,” she said. Dixon sees the future of crypto payments in stablecoins. Last year, the company added USDC to its network, enabling people to pay much less than on other systems like Ethereum, due to Stellar’s low fees, which are typically a small fraction of a penny.Įspecially in today’s bear market, boosting accessibility is a way to address the misconception that crypto is just for trading, since this improves other uses such as payments, Dixon said.įor Stellar, that the new product uses USDC instead of its native XLM token highlights the organization’s recent focus on stablecoins. Since Stellar launched in 2014, its focus has been payments. “We're actually really trying to target those users that have cash and really grow their opportunity.” “From that standpoint, this really changes, potentially, a huge amount and really brings the cash-based world into the digital economy,” said Denelle Dixon, CEO at Stellar Development Foundation. Finding a super-anchorįor Stellar, the deal is part of its goal of opening up access to crypto to underserved or unbanked populations. If Stellar and MoneyGram pull off the project and show they can attract new consumers to crypto, it could open up a much larger market for crypto and Web3, and serve as a model for other companies looking to increase access. “It makes a lot of sense to, because that's the only way you're gonna get more crypto into the ecosystem.” “It's an interesting and tough problem,” said Anand Iyer, founder at venture firm Canonical Crypto, which hasn’t invested in Stellar but is actively watching the infrastructure market. The partners plan to add crypto cash-outs in almost all MoneyGram countries, more than 200, by the end of June. It also shows how crypto needs to integrate with existing financial systems to bring in mainstream users. The service - initially available in the U.S., Canada, Kenya and the Philippines and expanding to seven more countries this month and other countries later - is an example of the ways that new crypto markets are converging with traditional finance. The service will use the USDC stablecoin on the Stellar network. Through a partnership with money-transfer company MoneyGram that’s launching Friday, people can bring fiat currency to a MoneyGram location, convert it to crypto and convert crypto back out to fiat. Stellar Development Foundation, which supports the Stellar Network, has come up with a way to address the problem. can move in and out of crypto easily, it’s much more difficult if you’re in an emerging market and don’t have a bank account or credit card. While wealthier people in big markets such as the U.S. The lack of solid crypto on- and off-ramps - rails for efficiently converting dollars, yen, euros and other currencies into tokens - is a bottleneck that has held back the industry’s growth.