Digital asset startup Ubyx has raised $10 million to promote what it calls “stablecoin ubiquity.”
In other words, the company said in announcing its seed round Tuesday (June 17), Ubyx aims to deliver on the “global acceptance of many stablecoins,” with participating issuers that include Paxos, Ripple, Agora, Transfero, Monerium and GMO Trust.
“The stablecoin market structure today has barriers to mass adoption,” Ubxy wrote on its blog. “The paradigm of on/off-ramping into/out of the crypto world is a bottleneck for users. Each stablecoin issuer has to build their own distribution network, at great cost. Corporates and banks cannot currently hold stablecoins on their balance sheets as cash equivalents.”
The company says it solves these issues and expands the market with its clearing system for stablecoins, connecting issuers and receiving institutions, and “allowing redemption of stablecoins for fiat at par value” into bank and FinTech accounts.
“By solving market fragmentation, standardizing redemption to support cash-equivalent accounting treatment, and aligning economic incentives, Ubyx will usher in the stablecoin epoch,” the blog post added.
Ubyx’s new funding round comes at a time when stablecoins are already starting to feel ubiquitous, with companies from Bank of America to Walmart and Amazon looking to launch their own version of the dollar-pegged currency, as PYMNTS wrote recently.
“Everyone, it appears, wants to get in on the action,” that report said. “But what separates true innovation in money movement from stablecoins ultimately serving as no more than a buzzy wrapper for what could essentially turn out to be the equivalent of casino chips on corporate blockchain, unusable anywhere else?”
The techno-shift toward stablecoins, PYMNTS added, is both fueling operational innovation and raising key questions about ecosystem control, systemic oversight and “the true novelty of branded, permissioned instruments operating within closed networks that may lack interoperability with the broader token landscape.”
Interoperability, the report noted, remains a hurdle for any stablecoin, not only those issued by the world’s biggest banks.
“Stablecoins are a great way to transfer value,” Kirill Gertman, CEO of Conduit, said in an interview with PYMNTS recently. “You can send USDC from here in New York to Singapore in seconds, and that’s great. But the challenge happens when you actually need to use USDC or USDT for something.”
