• The Spacewalk bridge is already live on Polkadot’s canary network Kusama and will go live on Polkadot’s mainnet in two-three weeks.
• This bridge between Stellar and Polkadot seeks to connect fiat currencies and stablecoins.

Stellar, the cryptocurrency payments specialist recently introduced its newly built Spacewalk bridge connecting the blockchain to Polkadot and its sister platform Kusama. This development will connect the two blockchain ecosystems with Stellar’s fiat-on-ramps worldwide.

Pendulum, a recent Polkadot parachain auction winner has built the bridge connecting the forex markets with decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. This will be especially applicable in emerging markets where Stellar has built a strong footprint and joined hands with the likes of cross-border payment companies like MoneyGram.

However, major economies like the United States have been derailing crypto banking rails amid the recent regulator crackdown due to high crypto exposure to banks. Also, with three banks collapsing within a week’s time – Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank – regulators have turned extra vigilant on the banks’ exposure to crypto. However, seasoned blockchain platforms like Stellar have continued to build out critical infrastructure to do the job elsewhere.

The Spacewalk bridge is already live on Polkadot’s canary network Kusama. Pendulum co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Torsten Stüber said that they will open the Polkadot version in a week or two. Stüber further stated that Pendulum’s mission is to connect decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance.

The focus will be on connecting fiat tokens to stablecoins. It’s not necessary that they would be connecting Stellar Lumens (XLM), the native cryptocurrency of the Stellar Network. In an interview with CoinDesk, Stüber added:

Stellar has a great implementation of stablecoins, as well as on-ramps and off-ramps in different countries for different kinds of fiat currencies. I don’t think you’ll find any other network that has so many different fiat currencies tokenized on the platform.

USDC Stablecoin Will Benefit From Spacewalk Bridge

The major stablecoin that the Spacewalk bridge plans to connect with the fiat tokens is the USDC stablecoin. Furthermore, it is the same stablecoin that Stellar integrated with MoneyGram last year. The USDC stablecoin has recently come under much pressure amid its exposure to Silicon Valley Bank.

Although USDC lost its Dollar-peg last week, Circle has managed to handle the situation well and regained the peg for USDC.

Tomer Weller, vice president, of products at Stellar Development Foundation said that they are planning to add support for an array of regional currency stablecoins. This includes Brazilian Reals, Argentinian Pesos, Kenyan shilling, some African stablecoins as well as a couple of Euro-based stablecoins. Weller further added:

Basically, every MoneyGram agent in the world is an access point to the Stellar network. So users can off-ramp their Stellar assets to actual cash in more than 300,000 locations around the world. They can also access and on-ramp their cash to crypto, and specifically stablecoins, in a smaller subset of that, and we’re slowly rolling that out to more and more countries.

As of press time, Stellar’s native cryptocurrency XLM is trading 4.0% up at a price of $0.08771 and a market cap of $2.3 billion.