Financial services giant Wells Fargo has announced the launch of a settlement service called “Wells Fargo Digital Cash,” which will run on its distributed ledger technology platform.
According to the company’s announcement, Wells Fargo Digital Cash is a service that’ll bring in operational efficiencies as it’ll remove “barriers to real-time financial interactions” across its own network. The Digital Cash will “complete internal book transfer of cross-border payments” and its concept has already successfully been proven.
Lisa Frazier, head of the Innovation Group at Wells Fargo, was quoted as saying:
- We believe DLT holds promise for a variety of use cases (…) Wells Fargo Digital Cash has the potential to enable Wells Fargo to remove barriers to real-time financial interactions across multiple accounts in multiple marketplaces around the world.
Speaking to The Block a Wells Fargo representative reportedly clartified that Wells Fargo Digital Cash is “not a cryptocurrency” before adding it is “1:1 against a tokenized USD/fiat currency that runs on a distributed ledger rail.”
When asked whether the Digital Cash could be considered a stablecoin, the representative reportedly stressed it’s an “internal settlement service” running on a “distributed ledger rail that supports tokenized fiat currency.”
Wells Fargo’s project is planned for next year and will initially completed transfers n U.S. dollars, although in the future it’s expected to add support for multiple currencies. The settlement service has been compared to JP Morgan Chase’s JPM Coin, a cryptocurrency developed for “instantaneous” transfer of payments between the financial giant’s institutional clients.
JPM Coin is a cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar at a 1:1 ratio, and is built on JPMorgan’s Quorum blockchain. Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase’s CEO, has hinted the cryptocurrency could one day be used for retail payments.
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