National Australia is the second of the big four banks to create its own stablecoin.
The AUDN will run on the Ethereum and Algorand intelligent contract blockchains. It will come out in the summer.
The goal is to give customers a token backed by A$ so they can settle blockchain transactions in real-time.
Howard Silb, NAB’s chief innovation officer, told the Australian Financial Review that the AUDN could also be used for “carbon credit trading, overseas money transfers, and repurchase agreements.”
NAB is following in the steps of rival bank ANZ, which used its A$DC stablecoin for the first time in June. Victor Smorgon Group used A$DC as a medium of exchange to buy BCAU carbon tokens from Zerocap, an Australian platform for investing in crypto assets.
Jonathon Miller, the Australian MD of crypto exchange Kraken, says that the adoption of stablecoins by two of Australia’s “big four” banks is an explicit recognition of the potential to make the financial system much more efficient through things like instant settlement, atomic swaps, intelligent contracts, and other programmatic use cases.
“We expect this trend to continue, inevitably evolving to include the adoption of various other cryptocurrencies and tokens for increasing use cases in the Australian economy,” he says.
