Hyundai, the world’s third-largest automaker by vehicle sales, put a cross-border domestic remittance system based on stablecoins on the Avalanche blockchain into production, becoming the first major South Korean company to do so.
“Hyundai is the first major company to publicly announce this type of implementation on Avalanche, but the initiative represents more than a technical experiment,” said Justin Kim, head of APAC at Ava Labs, which develops and supports the blockchain platform. “This is already a real treasury management use case, not a sandbox: the pilot moved USD and USDT live between Hyundai Motor entities in the US and Mexico.”
The international transfer comes as stablecoins gain traction beyond cryptocurrency trading. Large companies are increasingly testing the technology to move money between subsidiaries, settle cross-border payments and reduce the cost and time associated with traditional banking rails, Lindsey Einhaus, who heads strategy and operations at stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, said at Consensus Miami in May.
For the maker of Kia compact and Ioniq electric cars, the first phase involved transferring $20,000 from Hyundai Motor America to Hyundai Motor Mexico by converting dollars into Tether’s USDT stablecoin before converting the funds back to dollars.
