Dive Brief:
- Buy now, pay later company Klarna Group announced Tuesday that it is testing its own stablecoin, and plans to launch it publicly next year.
- The London-based BNPL is exploring internal use cases for the digital asset, which it has dubbed KlarnaUSD, a Tuesday news release said.
- “Crypto is finally at a stage where it is fast, low cost, secure and built for scale,” Klarna co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in the release. Siemiatkowski had been a “vocal crypto skeptic,” according to the company’s release, but he’s turned a corner.
Dive Insight:
Klarna is still in the early stages of exploring the use of its stablecoin, a spokesperson said in an email. The company is testing it on an internal system, the release said.
“Our first focus will be on internal uses like reducing the cost of international payments within Klarna,” the spokesperson, John Craske, said. “We plan to look at how stablecoins could help enable peer-to-peer and cross-border payments to merchants.”
Craske declined to say when the stablecoin will be officially put to use.
Stablecoins are often discussed as a way to make international money movement simpler and less expensive.
Klarna launched its stablecoin on the blockchain Tempo, which was started by the digital payments giant Stripe and the cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm, the company’s news release said.
A blockchain is a distributed ledger that makes it possible to move digital assets like stablecoins, a kinda of cryptocurrency pegged to the value of a more stable asset, such as the U.S. dollar.
