The confirmation time for transactions will be as low as four seconds and transaction fees will be a fraction of a percent, according to Algorand.
The stablecoin operator Tether recently launched its US dollar-backed stablecoin USDT on the Algorand proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.
In a press release issued on February 10th, Tether explained that USDT on Algorand will feature confirmation times as low as four seconds and transaction fees will be a fraction of a percent.
“Our latest collaboration with Algorand leverages the speed and security of Algorand’s protocol to give traders fast settlement and reduced counterparty risk in their fiat to digital assets transactions”, Tether Chief Technical Officer Paolo Ardoino said.
Ardoino says the launch on EOS is necessary, citing the highly awaited launch of eosfinex as the reason.
The official website of Algorand explains that Algorand “is an open-source public blockchain based on a pure proof-of-stake consensus protocol that supports the scalability and decentralization needed for today’s economy”.
Tether is the first stablecoin that was launched on Algorand’s blockchain platform, according to the press release. Until now, USDT has already been launched on Ethereum, EOS, the Liquid Network, Omni and Tron (TRX) so this is another stablecoin that is now available for crypto users.
USDT is the leading stablecoin on the market and, during the first days of February, it has a market value of $4.6 billion and also reports a 24-hour trading volume of $46.1 billion. These figures are according to CoinMarketCap, a website for tracking the capitalization of various cryptocurrencies.
Major financial institutions including central banks and major technology and financial services firms have entered the stablecoin space. For this reason, the crypto world continues growing and financial institutions are giving their support to stablecoins backed in traditional assets such as gold or fiat currencies like the Dollar.
Last March 2019 it was reported that six international banks signed letters of intent to issue their stablecoins backed by their national fiat currencies on IBM’s now-live blockchain-powered payments network, called Blockchain “World Wire” (BWW), which is the first blockchain network of this kind to integrate payment messaging, clearing and settlement on a single unified network and allows participants choose from a variety of digital assets.
BWW currently supports more than 47 currencies for payments across 72 countries. It disintermediates legacy bank settlement systems by introducing the XLM token as an efficient, immutably-tracked settlement instrument for fiat currencies between institutional parties.
“Our view for stablecoins is really that they should be more broadly accessible and what World Wire seeks to do is to provide fungibility of digital assets across financial institutions”, IBM Head of Blockchain Solutions, Jesse Lund, commented last March 2019.
IBM’s cross-border payment network, Blockchain World Wire (BWW) was launched in collaboration with Stellar (XLM) in September 2018. BWW aims to leverage cryptocurrencies to enable near real-time international settlements between banks.
This is just another advantage that the crypto technology offers and now is very useful to save not only time but time too.
By Maria Rodriguez
