On Wednesday (January 15), Binance announced that it had invested in BxB, the FinTech startup behind KRWb, the world’s first fully-collateralized South Korean won (KRW) backed stablecoin.

As Alex Friedberg, a Co-Founder of Singapore-based Block by Block (BXB) Capital, which has also invested in this project, explained in a Medium blog post on 29 January 2019, KRWb is “an ERC-20 token that is issued at a 1:1 ratio to, and collateralized by, fiat deposits denominated in Korean Won (KRW), the national currency of South Korea.”

The BxB team say that these are the main features of HRWb:

  • Global Accessibility: “Accessible and transferrable by any token holder globally – Korean, non-Korean and corporate entities”
  • Security: “Fully funded and backed by fiat, third party auditors, major Korean banks, and Korean civil/commercial law”
  • Transparency: “Tokens in circulation will match bank funds 100%, verifiable via independent 3rd party audits”

According to KRWb’s whitepaper, crypto investors “may use KRWb as a stable asset for storage of value, to hedge F/X risks or to profit from arbitrage opportunities, contributing in turn to the growth of the market by increasing liquidity among cryptocurrency exchanges.” It also states that “BxB is fully committed to ensure that all safeguards, such as periodic bank statement reports and independent audits of reserves, pledge over the accounts holding the backing fiat KRW funds via independent third parties are in place in order to maintain transparency and reliability.”

Binance Co-Founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (aka “CZ”) had this to say about his company’s latest partnership:

We are continuously working with local partners across regions to jointly realize our shared mission in furthering cryptocurrency adoption globally. This investment is another step forward in exploring avenues of growth in Korea, which is an industry-leading market strongly positioned to stimulate blockchain innovation throughout Asia.

CZ went on to say that details about this partnership will be announced in the near future:

We are currently developing future plans for the Korean market with BxB and hope to share more developments from our partnership soon.

As for Jiho Kang, a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of BxB, he said:

BxB’s focus has always been to contribute safe and stable industry growth in Korea as a locally rooted company. We are very excited to partner with Binance and looking forward to providing a service that’s both meaningful and useful to our communities and the Korean market while ensuring proper diligence from the formulation of the business and full regulatory compliance.

Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com