Dala has officially announced a new multi-chain strategy that will include Stellar, the technology behind the seventh largest cryptocurrency (lumens) by market cap. Dala is looking to create the most decentralized financial system available by bring together top blockchains and protocols. It hopes to reach developing markets by establishing a decentralized system that allows users to borrow, earn, save and transact funds.
Dala says it will be using Stellar for payments, along with Ethereum for its smart contract capabilities. Stellar promises speedy and low-cost transactions for customers, and Dala executives believe its blockchain will lead to steady user growth.
Dala is a new cryptocurrency issued by the Dala Foundation. As a general purpose ERC-20 token, Dala’s ecosystem consists of several partnerships across the globe, making it a borderless financial system. Dala also powers blockchain-backed Wala, a zero-fee monetary platform built for mobile devices.
Tricia Martinez is the founder and CEO of Wala, and the director of the Dala Foundation. Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, she explained why the team was adamant about working with Stellar over something larger and more established like Bitcoin.
“Stellar has been designed as a payment network to integrate disparate currencies, payment systems and entities to move value quickly and reliably at almost no cost,” she states. “Stellar scales exceptionally well — transactions are generally confirmed in three to five seconds, and transaction throughput of up to 10,000 transactions per second has been reported. Furthermore, transactions on Stellar are extremely cheap in the region of 100,000 transactions for $0.01. This aligns with the core need identified when Dala was created: emerging market consumers need the ability to transact micropayments instantly at no cost.”
Lisa Nestor, Director of Partnerships at the Stellar Development Foundation, also provided her commentary as to why the Stellar blockchain was the best and only choice. She says that the reason Stellar moves so quickly is because it does not use proof-of-work (PoW), relying instead on the Stellar Consensus Protocol.
“With Stellar, it’s easier to move between local currencies and digital currencies, which makes it ideal for cash-heavy, emerging economies,” she says. “Stellar’s architecture makes it an ideal, open-source tool for digitizing and trading any type of asset, from currency to mobile money.”
Concluding our interview, Martinez says Dala is the first cryptocurrency in existence to be completely “blockchain agnostic,” and that it can run on virtually any blockchain depending on the use case. “Dala will take advantage of the best blockchains to drive financial inclusion and bring a decentralized system to the masses,” she explains. “It gives us great pleasure to announce that we will be using Stellar for payments.”
Integration is currently underway, and the partnership between Dala and Stellar will go live in the fourth quarter of 2018.