Australian stablecoin startup Stables expands to Europe and UK

Australian stablecoin payments startup Stables has announced its expansion to Europe and the United Kingdom in partnership with Mastercard, which co-founder Bernado Billota says indicates a wider trend of the dollar-pegged assets breaking into the mainstream. 

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Bilotta said the expansion marked an important step for his firm, noting an increase in the size of the total addressable market of new customers in Europe, which he said was roughly twenty times the size of Australia.

The new partnership will allow Stables users to make purchases with Circle’s USD Coin ( USDC ) in 27 countries throughout Europe wherever MasterCard is accepted and through digital vendors like Apple and Google Pay. 

He added that stablecoins are no longer just for those who “live and breathe crypto." Instead, dollar-pegged assets are being picked up by everyday people with a genuine need to use them. 

Bilotta said stablecoins — described by Morgan Stanley as “crypto’s killer app” — have now firmly emerged from “crypto-native” circles.

While crypto itself is known for being highly speculative, Bilotta said it was ironic that the product with the best “product-market fit” is actually the most stable.

“Everybody in crypto is talking about Dogwifhat — stuff that goes up and down — but if you look at the data, the thing that has actually got product market fit is digital dollars.”

As of today, stablecoins are used by hundreds of thousands of crypto-native and non-crypto-native users for trading, remittances, cross-border payments and other payment applications around the world.

Bilota said people from countries experiencing high levels of inflation —  such as Argentina and Turkey —  as well as regions with high levels of “currency fragmentation” like South East Asia were flocking to stablecoins as a more “stable” alternative.

Australia an ideal “sandbox” to build a crypto firm

Founded in 2021, Stables is an Australian stablecoin payments startup that allows users to purchase everyday items with USDC via a digital debit card anywhere Mastercard is accepted.

Stables touts backing by crypto venture fund Jump Capital, Pocketbook co-founder Alvin Singh, Bosco Tan, and Zip co-founder Larry Diamond.

In March, Stables launched capabilities for users to engage in international remittance payments between Australia and the Philippines.

On June 25, Stables, in collaboration with Mastercard, enabled support for the euro on its app, allowing users to spend USDC in 23 countries throughout the European Union.

Despite crypto regulation not being as clear in Australia as it is in the European Union — which is set to introduce its sweeping crypto framework, MiCA , in December — Billato said Australia was the ideal “sandbox” for building a crypto firm.

“Australia has one of the highest bars for regulation in the world when it comes to financial services. So, operating in such a high-standard regime means that it’s easier for us to go and export our models in other jurisdictions,” he said.

Other larger crypto businesses, including the Australian arms of exchanges Kraken and Coinbase, have previously expressed concerns about the country’s lack of regulatory clarity, citing unclear frameworks for how exchanges and crypto firms should operate.

Bilotta said he didn’t share many of these concerns, noting that his company didn’t require users to take on risk in the same way crypto exchanges do and was already fully compliant with all of the necessary domestic regulations.

Related: Stablecoin transfer volume increased 16x during past 4 years

He added that the Australian government would only need to make a few small changes — the most pressing of which was sorting out banking issues with crypto companies — if it wanted to become a “crypto hub.”

“[Australia] could become a very favorable place to come and build crypto businesses. We already have ourselves Synthetix, Infinex, Immutable, and THORChain,” Bilotta said, listing several large crypto firms born out of Australia.

“There’s already a lot of crypto innovation that’s come out of Australia,” he added.

He noted the biggest risk for crypto companies in Australia was being debanked by local financial institutions.

The Australian crypto industry dealt a major blow in May 2023 when Binance announced the suspension of Australian dollar fiat services in the country following a decision from Cuscal, its third-party payment service provider.

Additionally, several of Australia’s largest “Big Four” banks have cracked down on both retail and commercial crypto use in Australia over the last 18 months .

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