Crypto payments specialist Stellar has established a bridge to Polkadot and its sister network Kusama, providing a connection between the two blockchain ecosystems and Stellar’s fiat on-ramps worldwide. This bridge, Spacewalk, was built by Polkadot parachain auction winner Pendulum and will enable decentralized finance (DeFi) applications to access foreign exchange (forex) markets, particularly in emerging markets.
Since its launch in 2014, Stellar has managed to grow a presence in these regions and has partnered with several cross-border payments companies, such as MoneyGram. The Spacewalk bridge is currently available on Kusama’s canary network, and the Polkadot version will be released within the next one to two weeks, according to Pendulum’s CTO, Torsten Stüber.
The main goal of Pendulum is to combine traditional finance with DeFi, and Stüber noted that the bridge will primarily focus on stablecoins and fiat tokens, rather than Stellar’s native cryptocurrency, Lumens. In fact, the Stellar platform has a great implementation of stablecoins, as well as a wide range of tokenized fiat currencies.
Stellar’s VP of Product, Tomer Weller, added that the network has enabled users to off-ramp their Stellar assets to cash in over 300,000 locations worldwide, and has been steadily rolling out the ability to access and on-ramp cash to crypto, specifically stablecoins, to more countries. As a result, every MoneyGram agent can be used as an access point to the Stellar network.
