Last week Coins.ph said it had started testing its a Philippine Peso stablecoin, PHPC, as part of a Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) sandbox. It commenced testing the stablecoin in April which will likely continue until June. At that point, it’s hoping to open it up for broader usage, but that will be subject to the central bank’s assessment. The stablecoin is backed by cash and cash equivalents held at Philippine banks.
It says the trials will involve ‘real world applications’. Given the 12 million or so Filipino diaspora, cross border remittances are the most obvious one. It will also target domestic payments, although this competes with the 24/7 faster payment system InstaPay, which has a transaction limit equivalent to $865. Most other use cases are crypto focused, such as trading, hedging when there’s market volatility and using the stablecoin as collateral for DeFi applications.
“While PHPC presents a variety of potential applications in trading and payments, we anticipate remittances to be a foremost use case for Filipinos, as PHPC will not only reduce costs; it also means that now peso transactions can happen 24/7 and in real time,” said CEO Wei Zhou, according to GMA News.
Coins.ph is already active in remittances. In 2019 it inked a deal with Western Union that enabled offshore workers to optionally remit payments directly to the Coins.ph wallet.
With 7 million active users of its wallet, Coins.ph already holds licenses as an e-money firm and a virtual currency service provider in the Philippines. More recently it has acquired licenses in several other jurisdictions.
