The German Bankhaus von der Heydt (BVDH) has launched a Euro stablecoin on the Stellar network.
The bank claimed that EURB was the first stable currency issued by a banking institution. The EURB stablecoin was launched today and was developed by BVDH and digital asset custody technology provider Bitbond on the Stellar blockchain.
The EURB stablecoin is fully regulated and 100% backed by the Euro. Due to strict supervision and KYC requirements, EURB cannot be publicly traded on the exchange.
If a customer wants to buy this kind of stable currency, he must save a legal currency transfer on BVDH to a third-party custodial account, so that EURB can be issued. The statement stated that developers of financial applications can immediately use this token to settle asset transfers on the chain. The underlying platform established by Bibond fully controls the security of the stablecoin to the bank, including the charging and minting mechanism.
BVDH was established in 1754 and has been focusing on serving institutional clients involved in securities-related transactions. After a year of exploring distributed ledger technology, BVDH chose to cooperate with Stellar and Bitbond (which has been working with BVDH since 2019). Philipp Doppelhammer, General Manager of BVDH, explained:
“We are attracted to Bitbond and Stellar because they make it easy for us to issue and manage assets.”
Doppelhammer said that the first use case of EURB will be: corporate customers of the blockchain payment company SatoshiPay use it for “cross-border fund transfers.”
Lukas Weniger, business development manager of BVDH, said that the main shortcoming of stablecoins is the lack of support from a fully licensed bank. Bitbond founder and CEO Radoslav Albrecht pointed out:
“Banks usually don’t want to use stablecoins like Tether or USDC because they may have counterparty risk. They prefer to use stablecoins issued by banks, as do institutional investors.”
The Federal Financial Supervisory Authority of Germany has approved Bitbond to issue tokenized bonds on Stellar.
Earlier this week, German private bank Hauck&Aufhäuser announced that its first cryptocurrency fund, HAIC Digital Asset Fund I, will be launched on January 1, 2021. The fund will include BTC, ETH and XLM.
