Stellar lumens has been growing in importance, within the financial ecosystem. Today, the nation, a major newspaper in Thailand has announced that K-Bank will be partnering with Visa in piloting a blockchain-based B2B platform. This is what Visa country manager had to say about the deal,
“Visa is proud that we have representation from a Thai financial institution in the pilot programme. Building on the enterprise blockchain technology, Visa B2B Connect is a new transaction platform designed for the exchange of high-value international payments between participating banks on behalf of their corporate clients. Managed by Visa end-to-end, Visa B2B Connect combines Visa’s core capabilities in security, governance and distributed ledger technology.”
So how does Stellar come into this deal? Well, the thing is, Visa B2B was developed in partnership with Chain Inc. Chain was recently acquired by stellar backed Lightyear to form Interstellar. Under the deal, all the financial institutions using Chain will start using the public stellar blockchain. Technically, this means that K-Bank and all other institutions that are using Chain will be running on the stellar blockchain.
Clearly, the stellar network is getting more entrenched in the global banking industry. That’s because it is also gaining interest through its partnership with IBM. IBM is the main financial technology for banks in over 80% in the world. IBM has already launched the World wire, a stellar-based platform that is meant to help banks clear cross-border payments in a matter of second. This gives Stellar a major edge in the race to disrupt the cross-border payments market.
But what gives Stellar an even bigger intrinsic value in the market is the fact that it also has a major use case in asset tokenization. STOs are the future of financing in that, they pretty much eliminate all the loopholes that come with ICOs. That’s because STOs entail the financing of existing businesses that are fully compliant with security regulations. Stellar stands to lead the way in the coming STO revolution because of its DEX platform, and the fact that it is feeless and highly scalable.
Signs of Stellar’s future reign in this market are already there, as was the case with Robinhood, which will be tokenized on stellar by a Silicon Valley startup. The startup is also looking to tokenize ripple on stellar, and that is definitely a big deal. As STOs pick momentum, it could become the norm for all other companies, and pretty much tokenize the stock markets, unlocking limitless potential in global blue chip stocks. All the above are trillion dollar markets, from cross-border payments to the tokenization of securities.
Going by today’s news from Thailand, how has Stellar reacted? Well, the market has been in the red all day today, and this has affected the price of Stellar (XLM) as well. Since the K-Bank news do not affect Stellar directly, the market didn’t react much. However, once the market rebounds and the magnitude of today’s news sinks in, Stellar will explode in value.
Stellar has been one of the best performing cryptos in quarter 3, and stands to be one of the best performers going into quarter 4 of 2018, going by its recent moves in the market. It is slowly getting entrenched in the banking industry, as well as the wider finance industry, and this will see its value soar going into the future. Its network effect in the market is pretty much unrivalled at this point. A $1 – $2 Stellar (XLM) is very much possible in the next few months.
