By Hardware cryptocurrency wallet manufacturer Ledger recently announced plans to expand their support for stablecoins including Tether (USDT) usability across all their services & platforms according to the company’s executives.
Ledger currently supports Tether on their handheld storage products, two products known as Ledger Nano & Ledger Blue and have announced their plans to add the dollar-backed stablecoin to their vault services.
This decision comes as a surprise despite the recent loss of parity that Tether experienced with the dollar but Benjamin Soong, head of operations for the Asia-Pacific region of Ledger claims that the popular dollar-backed token holds strong in terms of popularity in the region.
“One thing that is slightly unique in China and South Korea is the demand for USDT,” “Since both of those countries have capital controls, in terms of your ability to move currency out of the country,” said Soong on Wednesday.
Soong, who is also heading up the opening of a Hong Kong Ledger office claims that South Korean & Chinese investors are more than often quite comfortable with fiat-backed currencies which mirror capital markets of the traditional kind.
Despite Tether “breaking the buck” just two weeks back the demand for the dollar-pegged currency continues to dominate trading pairs across Asian exchanges such as Huobi where the volume has gone up to almost 26% over a 24 hour period last week according to CoinMarketCap.
Tether “is a vehicle that is kind of unique in the market out here, that I’ve seen so far,” claimed Soong.
Furthermore, Ledger will also be adding other stablecoins in an effort to majorly expand their custody business and their goal is to ultimately support more than 100 different stablecoins by the end of 2019 according to Ledger President Pascal Gauthier:
“We have a big road of integrating many things right now, including stablecoins.”
Soong The New Hire:
Soong is a capitals market champion who is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese, making him the perfect candidate to build a 12-strong team in Hong Kong as well as be in charge of evaluating potential satellite headquarters in Singapore & Japan according to Gauthier:
“You need to hire local talent, people who understand the local culture,”
Add to this the fact that, currently 30% of Ledger’s hardware sales come from Asian markets and this is despite a lack of the company’s ground presence on the continent.
“This is an asset class where the retail has really led the way, following by the institutional players coming in,” said Soong adding:
“We’re definitely seeing a lot of traditional asset managers and banks start to explore how they are going to enter and support this asset class moving forward.”
However, when it comes to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Soong claims that traditional asset managers across the Asian-Pacific still opt to move their funds into crypto where custody solutions offer the same levels of security & trust as that of banks. Thus, Ledger currently has an institutional custody partnership on the horizon with Nomura – a traditional Japanese bank.
“They [wealth managers] would ultimately prefer to work with traditional financial institutions, which is why partnering with Nomura makes a lot of sense,” said Soong.
Many banks, corporations, currency exchanges in Hong Kong have already begun to enquire about adding crypto custody solutions according to Soong:
“Hedge fund managers, people who were in investment banking, are all moving into this space to help build up the infrastructure for this new asset class.”
Furthermore, Ledger is also currently building bridges with the Hong Kong based Output Hong Kong (IOHK) a blockchain startup headed up by Ethereum’s co-founder Charles Hoskinson and next week during the Hong Kong Fintech week, the two companies will co-host a party for the local crypto-community.
Could Ledger’s plans to support Tether be the saving grace that the token needs? Let us know your thoughts.
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