After Solana boasted this week about its unique partnership with remittance big Western Union for its USDPT stablecoin, researchers remained skeptical that the partnership will achieve significant traction. The unlucky actuality of such bulletins is preliminary hype and minimal follow-up.
Certainly, for practically a decade, crypto partnerships with conventional finance — and remittance firms specifically — have nearly at all times fizzled out after their preliminary fanfare.
Crypto giants like Ripple and Stellar have introduced a dizzying array of press releases that finally resulted in minimal on-chain exercise.
In line with a criticism by the US Securities and Trade Fee, for instance, Ripple “made an avalanche of public statements” through the years in an try to extend the worth of XRP because it offered over $2 billion value of the token.
Ripple contested that characterization and misplaced one criticism on the marginally decrease quantity of $728 million value of unregistered securities through institutional gross sales of XRP.
Protos has already lined Ripple’s lackluster offers with:
FairFX
RationalFX
Exchange4Free
UniPAY
UnionPay
Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis
Mercy Corps
Mojaloop Basis
Institute for Enterprise and Social Affect
Lunu
Travelex Financial institution
Moneygram
Ripple, Stellar, and extra failed crypto-TradFi partnerships
Stellar, based by Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb, has additionally introduced a wide range of partnerships that expired after minimal traction.
The corporate’s marquee partnership with IBM World Wire, for instance, would have utilized stellar (XLM) for cross-border funds. Nevertheless, it has now been sunsetted as open-source with IBM publishing the code on GitHub and principally abandoning the initiative.
Stellar additionally had a partnership with Wyre to develop on- and off-ramps for digital asset funds. Wyre ended these enterprise operations in June 2023, terminating the partnership.
Like Ripple, Stellar additionally had a failed pilot program with MoneyGram. The remittance big introduced plans to launch a non-custodial pockets at a September 2023 Stellar Growth Basis assembly.
MoneyGram had initially deliberate to launch it in Q1 2024 however as a substitute, whereas it didn’t precisely cancel plans outright, pivoted to creating an app that permits customers to ship and obtain USDC with an obvious off-ramp.
Though over 90% of USDC quantity happens on the Ethereum, Solana, and BNB blockchains, in that order, a tiny quantity of USDC does technically transact on the Stellar blockchain.
In the end, partnerships between decentralized finance and conventional finance typically disappoint early supporters.
Certainly, a 2019 examine of Ripple’s remittance bulletins concluded, regardless of early optimism in regards to the partnerships, that significant integration remained elusive.
Equally, a 2024 examine of crypto-remittance partnerships detailed how they’ve repeatedly encountered technical complexity and resistance by incumbent monetary establishments.
A 2025 OECD working paper concluded, “The use of blockchain technology is unlikely to eliminate or address the challenge of last-mile delivery in cash.”
