Xfers, a digital fintech platform in Southeast Asia, announces that it has launched StraitsX, a blockchain-enabled initiative that seeks to further the goal of building an open financial ecosystem for inclusion in the region.
Powered by Ziliqa, the high-security blockchain that powers enterprises and applications, Xfers aims to make StraitsX a frictionless and transparent payments ecosystem for Southeast Asia.
In January 2019, Xfers obtained the approval for Widely Accepted Stored Value Facility (WA SVF) from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), making it the first digital wallet to do so.
Xfers was founded in 2015. Its vision is to provide last-mile financial services to the region.
Access to traditional banking services in Southeast Asia may sometimes be difficult outside of urban areas despite the mobile user penetration rate of over 140 per cent in the region.
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Xfers launches of their StraitsX pilot initiative starting with XSGD, a token pegged 1:1 to the Singapore Dollar to increase the level of transparency for transactions, while also reducing friction to accessing financial products.
This initiative will be supported by a number of early members, such as Binance Singapore, Coinhako, Coinut, Sparrow, Tokenize Xchange, and WoWoo Exchange.
“StraitsX demonstrates our willingness to adopt technology to propel our vision of building an open banking infrastructure for the region. With the transparency that blockchain provides, as well as the stable coins being price-pegged to local fiat currencies, StraitsX aims to be the common ledger for digital assets, payments, fund transfers, and eCommerce,” said Tianwei Liu, Co-Founder, and CEO, Xfers.
To remove friction and provide greater transparency, Xfers will be leveraging Zilliqa’s safe-by-design scripting language Scilla to provide smart contract functionalities.
Zilliqa is known for its use of sharding as an on-chain solution to preserve trust and enable greater scalability. Through this partnership, Zilliqa’s proprietary smart contract language, Scilla, will ensure the security of the underlying smart contracts of the Xfers stable coins.
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“We are excited for Xfers as they continue to make inroads into Southeast Asia. Harnessing the features of our enterprise blockchain, Xfers will be able to process a significant increase in user transactions more securely at a scale than other present-day industry blockchain platforms,” said Amrit Kumar, President, Zilliqa.
Currently, Xfers’ clients include digital asset firms Binance Singapore, Coinhako, and WoWoo Exchange, as well as merchants serving the underbanked in Indonesia – PayFazz, Porter Indonesia, and Tunai Kita.
Xfer’s stable coin pilot is set to go live in December 2019.
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Photo by Aleksi Räisä on Unsplash
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