Polkadot: fiat and crypto from Stellar network

The Polkadot blockchain will soon be connected to Stellar’s fiat and crypto currencies thanks to the new Spacewalk bridge, built by the recent winner of Pendulum, the parachain connecting DeFi to the forex markets.

Polkadot and the Spacewalk bridge to access fiat and crypto currencies from Stellar

Polkadot announced the release of the new Spacewalk bridge that connects it to Stellar’s blockchain so it can access fiat and stablecoin currencies. 

10/ @pendulum_chain released the ‘Spacewalk’ bridge connecting @StellarOrg with Polkadot. Focused on seamless transfers of fiat and stablecoins to Polkadot, this expands cross-chain functionality in the crypto payments space. Learn more: https://t.co/9ld1CTq8Cz

— Polkadot (@Polkadot) March 13, 2023

Basically, the Stellar blockchain, which has created a dedicated infrastructure for stablecoins and fiat currency tokenization since its inception in 2014, will be able to be connected to Polkadot and its sister network Kusama.

This is possible thanks to the connections of the new Spacewalk bridge, built by Polkadot’s recent parachain auction winner, Pendulum, which aims to connect decentralized finance (DeFi) applications with foreign exchange (forex) markets.

In this regard, Pendulum co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Torsten Stüber said:

“Stellar has a great implementation of stablecoins, as well as on-ramps and off-ramps in different countries for different kinds of fiat currencies. I don’t think you’ll find any other network that has so many different fiat currencies tokenized on the platform.”

Polkadot will access cross-border crypto payments through MoneyGram

The Spacewalk bridge will allow Polkadot to access the entire infrastructure created by Stellar, especially that related to cross-border payments such as its partnership with MoneyGram. 

In this regard, Stüber who is also CTO of SatoshiPay, a cryptocurrency micropayments company that has a long history of development on Stellar, wanted to emphasize that the new bridge will not focus on using XLM, Stellar’s native crypto. Instead, the focus will be on the stablecoins and fiat tokens that exist on Stellar’s blockchain. 

And indeed, USD Coin (USDC) has already been chosen as the main stablecoin that will flow through the Spacewalk bridge. USDC is also the token that Stellar has integrated with MoneyGram and other companies.

Tomer Weller, vice president of product at the Stellar Development Foundation, highlighted a list of fiat tokens that are available on Stellar and may soon be used by Polkadot as well.

Among the many are already Argentine pesos and Brazilian reals tokenized, as well as a Kenyan shilling, other African stablecoins, and a couple of stablecoins pegged to the euro. In this regard, Weller also said:

“Basically every MoneyGram agent in the world is an access point to the Stellar network,” said Weller in an interview. “So users can off-ramp their Stellar assets to actual cash in more than 300,000 locations around the world. They can also access and on-ramp their cash to crypto, and specifically stablecoins, in a smaller subset of that, and we’re slowly rolling that out to more and more countries.”

DOT’s performance: “To-the-moon and back”

Since early 2023, Polkadot (DOT) seems to have gotten off to a great start, with a price pump that almost doubled it. And indeed, from the depths of $4 on New Year’s Eve 2023, DOT rose to close to $8 in mid-February, but then went back down again.

Yes, a real to-the-moon and back. At the time of writing, DOT is worth $6.15 and ranks 12th in crypto by market capitalization. DOT’s total marketcap now exceeds $7 billion.

Taking a step back, DOT had already managed to survive the general decline in late 2022 due to the collapse of the FTX crypto-exchange that negatively affected the entire crypto sector.

In fact, one report indicated that Polkadot (DOT) posted increases in Q4 2022 despite a 31% decline in its market capitalization. These were the quarterly revenues that remained unchanged and the supply of DOT tokens increased as was expected.

Not only that, the Web3 Foundation had also reported that the DOT token, which was questioned by the US SEC, is finally no longer considered as a security.

Finally, data analysis on the Polkadot Relay Chain showed impressive growth over Q3 2022, with daily active accounts increasing by 64% and new accounts by 49%.