(6 May 2022 – Australia) ANZ is actively leveraging global digital currency adoption by sustaining the success of first mover advantage with the first Australian-bank-issued stablecoin.
On the back of the group’s foremost stablecoin issuance of “A$DC” at the end of Q1 2022 through a public, permission-less blockchain transaction that used Fireblock's technology, ANZ is reporting multiple successful elements such as digital asset service components as composable and enterprise-ready. This is allowing the Bank to steer through costly centralised infrastructure while proclaiming lower barriers to entry and recognising the benefits of smart contract auditing, on-chain compliance and digital asset custody services. Regulators are also closely monitoring the bank's testing of innovative digital asset transactions.
“In a live transaction for ANZ customer Victor Smorgon Group we delivered the stablecoin to Zerocap, a private wealth management firm for digital assets. A$30 million in A$DC was minted as part of the transaction pegged to the Australian dollar, which was transferred between the two parties and then later redeemed into fiat currency conventional state-backed currency” the Bank said in a statement.
“Defi is new world and traditional banks are old-world TradeFi institutions but they are not necessarily mutually exclusive elements. As an approved deposit-taking institution we can hold deposits, that's valuable” commented ANZ Banking Services Portfolio Lead, Nigel Dobson who leads ANZ's payment platform strategy.
“Because of the regulatory perimeter in which we operate we can offer a number of other services, including the minting and redeeming part of the coin issuance and management. In the custody space which again is regulated, we can hold our customers' private keys on behalf of them. There are potentially other use cases where, depending on the nature of the assets that are tokenised, there will be a number of financing opportunities. As a bank, we're comfortable dealing with supply chain automation and digitisation opportunities” Dobson added.
“We're not altering the money supply. We're just enabling a transaction to occur in a venue that is new from an operating model point of view but not necessarily very new from a business model point of view.”