The week began with an announcement on July 16 from Coinbase, the US’ largest cryptocurrency trading platform, that Stellar was on its list of five candidate crypto-currencies for integration as a base currency.
A day later, a further announcement emerged from the Central Bank of Bahrain that the currency had been approved as Sharia-compliant, the first crypto to achieve such status and thus giving it a competitive head-start in a region where banking services just over 1.8 billion people.Â
Seminal Moment?
Further good news for the Stellar HODL’er faithful came midweek in the form of an indication from IBM’s Senior Vice President for Global Industries that “Stellar and its native asset Lumens (XLM) are currently being used by ‘a couple of the largest banks’ in financial exchange (FX) corridors.”
And if that wasn’t enough, the project team at Stronghold also confirmed their intention to issue the first USD-backed crypto-currency onto the Stellar network.
It is no surprise, then, that over the course of last week, Stellar leaped above its nearest opposition – Litecoin – in the crypto-ranking tables to become the sixth largest crypto-currency by market cap.
And even Kodak got in on the act, announcing that its own upcoming blockchain-based DRMplatform would be leveraging Stellar as its payments solution.Â
“This has been one of the most action-packed weeks I can recall for any crypto-currency project, never mind Stellar itself,” states Ali Yazbek, blockchain market analyst. “And considering its ongoing partnership with IBM, we may just have witnessed a seminal moment in the emergence of Stellar as the future leader in the blockchain payments space.”
