MoneyGram has launched its own stablecoin as it builds its blockchain payments infrastructure.
The native U.S. dollar coin, MGUSD, is designed less for crypto natives than for people who need to move money but don’t have access to traditional financial services, MoneyGram said in a news release Tuesday (June 2).
“The stablecoin market has largely focused on the asset itself. MoneyGram is taking a fundamentally different approach,” added Anthony Soohoo, the company’s CEO.
“Starting with our distribution platform, we’re using stablecoin as a foundation to build future applications on our global network. MGUSD is the stablecoin we built for our customers, for the families sending money home and for the billions of people around the world with limited financial access.”
In many markets, the company added, consumers deal with inflation, currency instability or lack access to reliable financial services. With MGUSD, those people get a “stable, dollar-denominated balance” they can hold and access 24/7, and move globally and convert into local currency as needed, MoneyGram said.
The release notes that a series of partnerships has helped bring MGUSD to life: Stripe-owned Bridge serves as the issuer, while the tokens are minted and burned with M0’s smart contract infrastructure and deployed at launch on the Stellar blockchain. The coin is held in Fireblocks wallets, which are used to send to customer wallets through the MoneyGram app.
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MoneyGram last year announced plans to introduce a new stablecoin-based solution for cross-border finance in Colombia before expanding it to additional markets.
In other stablecoin news, PYMNTS wrote this week about the hesitancy among chief financial officers (CFOs) to adopt the coins and other forms of cryptocurrency.
“The CFO story is not about fear of innovation,” that report said. “It is about control. Finance chiefs are responsible for cash flow, liquidity, compliance, accounting and risk. That makes digital assets harder to justify when rules remain unsettled and internal systems are built around familiar bank and treasury workflows.”
While stablecoins seem to have a more practical path than crypto, they are still a lesser priority for most finance chiefs until the infrastructure around them feels safer and more manageable, research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found.
That research showed that 77% of CFOs say that regulatory or compliance uncertainty was a barrier to using crypto in business payments or treasury functions, while 67% held the same view when it came to stablecoins.