SatoshiPay Receives R&D Grant from Stellar for Pendulum Blockchain

We are excited to announce that our portfolio company SatoshiPay has received a research and development grant from Stellar Development Foundation to start development of the Pendulum network — a new second-layer blockchain that connects Stellar to the wider DeFi ecosystem by adding smart contract support and bridges to Ethereum and Polkadot.

Justin Rice, VP of Ecosystem at Stellar Development Foundation says:

“SatoshiPay has a proven track record as a key Stellar network and ecosystem participant, and we couldn’t be more excited that they are exploring an opportunity to connect Stellar to the thriving DeFi ecosystem. With its unique tools for compliant connections to traditional banking networks, the Stellar network is well positioned to connect traditional finance with the innovative DeFi space. Pendulum has the potential to build bridges that increase Stellar’s interoperability with other networks, which could enable new use cases and help unlock the world’s economic potential by making money more fluid, markets more open, and people more empowered.”Stellar Development Foundation has granted SatoshiPay initial funding to kickstart the project and develop a proof of concept implementation of Pendulum. After completing the initial proof of concept, Pendulum will be further developed into a full-fledged decentralized layer 2 blockchain that will be accessible for everyone.

Meinhard Benn, CEO at SatoshiPay comments:

“With Pendulum, SatoshiPay is entering the protocol space, which is an exciting opportunity for us to drive forward permissionless innovation and to increase our impact on the blockchain ecosystem. We’ve been discussing options to execute arbitrary smart contracts with the Stellar team for quite some time and we are delighted to receive their technical input and financial support for this. We aim to bring together the best of two worlds — DeFi applications as we know them from Ethereum with Stellar’s compliant fiat tokens. It will be exciting to see liquidity enclosed in Stellar’s $9 billion market cap and the $7 trillion foreign exchange market interact with the booming DeFi economy via Pendulum.”