Stellar Development Foundation, the non-profit payment system behind the Stellar cryptocurrency has something interesting up its sleeves. SDF is now considering the acquisition of the 81-year-old remittance giant, MoneyGram.
According to reports, the San Francisco-based Stellar has teamed up with global private equity firm Advent International to buy the leading money transfer company. It is still a very early stage for speculation, but if the deal does go through, it would be nothing short of a very important milestone for Stellar which has remained in the shadows of Ripple.
Interestingly SDF project originally branched from blockchain company Ripple. It was the co-founder of Ripple, Jed McCaleb that left the company over disagreements and in 2014 launched the Stellar network. Both the platforms are focused on international funds remittance.
Termination of Ripple-MoneyGram Partnership
In 2019, Ripple had purchased a $30 million stake in MoneyGram with the partnership initially that was set for two years. As per the deal, MoneyGram was enabled to leverage Ripple’s product for cross-border payment and foreign exchange settlement.
Things sored when the US Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] charged Ripple, with conducting a $1.3 billion unregistered securities offering of XRP. Soon after which Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced the fintech firm and MoneyGram International’s decision to “wind down” their partnership. Together, the two entities had reportedly processed billions of dollars through RippleNet and On-Demand Liquidity [ODL].
The joint statement by Ripple and MoneyGram read,
“We are proud of the work we were able to accomplish in a short amount of time, as well as the impact we were able to achieve in bringing this first-of-its-kind product to market. We are both committed to revisiting our relationship in the future. We still believe in the promise of digital assets and blockchain technology to change the status quo in global payments for the benefit of billions of consumers around the world.”
Ripple Vs Stellar
The feud is neverending but both the companies have grown tremendously. While Ripple has emerged as the larger organization securing much more capital, Stellar, by contrast, is smaller but consists of a highly experienced team.
Their goal is also quite different. Ripple specifically aims to appeal to financial institutions and banks, which includes a massive market with a significant deal of potential for profit. Stellar, on the other hand, is a non-profit organization, and the main objective behind its creation is to make financial services accessible around the world and helping the unbanked.
At a price $0.583, XRP had strengthened its foothold among the top 10 crypto-assets by market cap, XLM, the once marquee token, fell to the 17th position and was trading at $0.249, at the time of writing.
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