Denver-headquartered American multinational financial services corporation Western Union is on track to introduce a Solana-based stablecoin, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The product, which has been dubbed the “U.S. Dollar Payment Token” (USDPT), is set to be launched next year.
Western Union, which boasts a total of 100 million customers in more than 200 countries, aims to make transactions more efficient.
The remittance behemoth famously completed the very first transcontinental telegraph line back in 1861.
President Devin McGranahan has stated that embracing represents the “next chapter” in its journey.
The company might now be facing more pressure to catch up with competitors, given that PayPal and MoneyGram have already stepped up their stablecoin game.
Dabbling in crypto
The stablecoin launch will not be the remittance giant’s first foray into crypto.
Back in 2015, Western Union and Ripple jointly launched a pilot project focused on settling transfers in real-time. However, the details of this pilot were extremely scant back then. Western Union never fully adopted Ripple’s tech, and former CEO Hikmet Ersek later complained that it was too expensive.
Throughout the years, Western Union has also filed various cryptocurrency-related patents and trademarks.
Even though the company’s involvement in crypto has so far been minimal, its new stablecoin could potentially have a significant impact, given that its global network moves hundreds of billions of US dollars per year.