Grab, StraitsX pilot use of purpose bound money during SG fintech festival

StraitsX, a part of Southeast Asia Digital Financial Services Group, Fazz, and Grab, a leading superapp in Southeast Asia, will be testing the issuance of Purpose Bound Money (PBM) in the form of commercial digital vouchers during the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF) 2022.

During SFF, 5,000 selected trial participants will be able to utilise PBM in the form of digital vouchers through their preferred blockchain e-wallet application. T

hey can use the vouchers sponsored by Temasek to make purchases at selected F&B outlets at the SFF 2022, as well as participating Grab’s merchant-partners such as Ishiro at Expo, and Flash Coffee, Han’s, Hotpot by Seoul Garden, and LiHo at Changi City Point.

GrabPay, Grab’s payment service, is working with StraitsX and digital currency payment gateway TripleA to support the last-mile settlement of PBM. This is done by accepting StraitsX’s XSGD on the Polygon chain, and reflecting the Singapore-dollar pegged stablecoin as SGD in the participating merchants’ GrabPay accounts.

GrabPay will also be the main merchant payments processor for the PBM pilot at SFF this year – it will pay out to participating merchants in SGD on an on-demand basis, and remove any need for merchants to invest in end-of-day reconciliation between two accounting systems.

“We see this as transformative for the development of the digital assets space as PBM could form a new foundation infrastructure for payments, ensuring secure transactions, ease of use and seamless integration. Building on the work StraitsX has done with the Singapore dollar stablecoin, XSGD, the issuance of PBMs further demonstrates how blockchain technology and stablecoins can be applied in real-world scenarios,” said Liu Tianwei, Deputy CEO of Fazz.

PBM is explored as part of Project Orchid, building upon the concept and capabilities of both programmable payment and programmable money.

This pilot project will delve into the enablement of PBM for the widespread distribution of money for commercial purposes, and its interoperability with e-wallets, payment systems and rails, and blockchains, allowing consumers to purchase goods and services through their preferred platform with PBM tokens.

PBM will enable individuals and organisations to embed logic-based conditions in the form of smart contracts that are automatically verified when submitted for transfers. At the same time, payments can be made more efficient, as the PBM token will unwrap and release the underlying digital currency, transferring it to a merchant’s digital wallet in real-time.

The digital currency can then be used by the recipient immediately for other payouts. In this pilot, the digital currency will be reflected as SGD and paid out to the participating merchants in SGD.

Apart from StraitsX, Grab and Temasek, other supporting partners include: ADDX, AltLayer, Automata, Coinbase Wallet, Digital Treasures Centre (DTC), Fomopay, Sequence, TripleA, Trust Wallet and VISA.