By
Svetlana Soroka
March 15th, 2023
The recent license for e-money secured by Elrond will allow it to offer its services across European Union and issue stablecoins.
The Layer-1 blockchain scalability platform Elrond announced its acquisition of payments processing platform Twispay. This comes following an official nod from the National Bank of Romania.
Twispay and Elrond
Financial institution Twispay provides digital payment services while issuing electronic money. Being authorized by the central bank Twispay is one of the major members of Visa and Mastercard. With this acquisition, Elrond will broaden the functionality of Twispay by integrating a fast, scalable, and cost-effective blockchain technology.
This is also the second acquisition from Elrond in recent times after it acquired payment gateway Utrust. The recent acquisitions are quite strategic and smart on part of Elrond. The goal here seems to be clear of bridging the gap between traditional finance and the crypto space.
Elrond’s announcement of acquiring Twispay first came last year in October 2021. However, the two parties were working with the National Bank of Romania to clear the legalities in the matter. After several rounds of constructive discussion, the efforts have finally given good results. Elrond Network CEO, Beniamin Mincu said:
“This landmark decision from the Romanian Central Bank opens the door for EU citizens, and soon for everyone everywhere, to significantly benefit from value flowing with near-instant settlement times, at 100x fewer costs, with full transparency, and higher reliability.”
What Does the New License Mean for Elrond
The new license secured by Elrond will allow it operate as e-money service provider across the European Union. Furthermore, the EU Commission’s proposed Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) allow e-money licensed institutions to issue stablecoins.
“We’ve been having focused conversations with the Romanian Central Bank about acquiring an e-money licensed institution that enables us to create stablecoins, for instance, in a legal and compliant way,” Mincu said.
Additionally, Elrond says that its technology maintains a “carbon negative” status by offsetting ore CO2. With the recent license, Elrond is in a position of building a sustainable architecture for a completely new payments rail that is faster, cheaper, transparent, and available to all.
Elrond notes that under the existing regulatory framework, the license might allow them to offer crypto-enabled debit cards along with other benefits of DeFi, NFTs, and other Web3 technologies.
