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Usually, the trade finance business, has been stereotypically low risk but high collateral in nature, but was not excused from the 2008 GFC (Global Financial Crisis). Regardless of LCs, Collections or open account methods of methods, the issues of securing and enforcing credible commitments across borders makes trade finance more vulnerable during FX turmoil.
While IBM has built-in trustworthy relationships with most of the large MNC banks, when a better transformation is needed by decades old industry, IBM recognized the need and announced the partnership with Stellar, which happened to be the IBM’s new overseas payment solution for clients.
However, somewhere, the genuine issue with transacting a cryptocurrency for cross border settlement has been losing value during the settlement for the billions of dollars worth transactions. Considerably, banks, essentially, require a steady and secured value coin to be able to convert to for payment and settlements.
Such scenario enables IBM to process overseas payments on the Stellar network deploying Stronghold USD — a stable coin pegged to the U.S. dollar.
Last week large cap altcoins outperformed the traditional market leader Bitcoin, with Ripple (XRP), Ethereum (ETH) and Stellar (XLM) relishing big weeks with gains of 105%, 10% and 37%, respectively. Only BTC has been laggard with 3% up in market capitalization. Well, overall the entire crypto market capitalization grew by 8%.
Technically, Stellar (XLMUSD), has been one of the star performers in the recent past, but for now, struggling at stiff resistance (refer daily chart). Minor trend edgy on shooting star & hanging man patterns, leading oscillators signal overbought pressures but no bearish momentum & trend indicators still bullish bias (4H chart).
The pair has shown an upsurge about more than 20 percent per day (couple of times in the recent weeks’ rallies), and considerably, more than 50 percent for the week, now ranked as the 6thlargest cryptocurrency by market capitalization (as per CoinMarketCap).
The glimmer of growth generated a new wave of bullish optimism, and reinforced the idea that crypto may end 2018 with bull run, as new trading volume and external interest seemed to enter the market.
IBM is presently deployed by more than 90% of the top 100 banks in the world and are well-established for those banks to transition from 50-year-old technology to capitalizing on the IBM/Stellar/Stronghold USD solutions. IBM and Stellar both together have taken firm decisions towards developing solutions to address the apprehensions of SWIFT mechanism.
Currency Strength Index: FxWirePro's hourly BTC spot index is inching towards -81 levels (which is bearish), while hourly USD spot index was at 114 (bullish) while articulating (at 12:50 GMT). For more details on the index, please refer below weblink:
