UnionBank to rollout ‘stablecoin’ in coming weeks

The Union Bank of the Philippines is scheduled to roll out its stablecoin service in the coming weeks, a top official of the company said Wednesday.

“I’m talking weeks ... several weeks,” UnionBank president and CEO Edwin Bautista told GMA News Online on the sidelines of the 2019 Awards Ceremony for Stakeholders at the central bank headquarters.

UnionBank’s stablecoin is spearheaded by its financial technology unit UBX. A stablecoin is cryptocurrency pegged to another stable asset such as gold or the US dollar, which minimizes volatility compared with other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

Bautista earlier said the company has already secured the approval of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) to launch stablecoin.

“Sure na sure na ‘yun, may BSP approval na ‘yun,” he said on Wednesday.

The cryptocurrency will be launched through the bank’s i2i service which currently runs on the ConsenSys’ Kaleido platform.

Project i2i—or island-to-island, institution-to-institution, and individual-to-individual—is UnionBank’s clearing system that connects rural banks through blockchain technology. —VDS, GMA News