ANZ's A$DC stablecoin believed to first-ever issued by a bank

The recipient of ANZ’s landmark stablecoin transaction has called it a “super exciting thing for the industry, not just in Australia, but globally”.

ANZ used A$DC stablecoin to send $30 million from family office Victor Smorgon Group to Melbourne-based crypto asset manager Zerocap using the Ethereum blockchain in just minutes.

“As far as we’re aware, this is a world-first for a bank to actually issue their own stablecoin,” Zerocap chief executive Ryan McCall told Blockchain Week on Thursday.

Zerocap worked with on the transaction “for a few months” and it came together in the last few days, he said.

“It is really significant. It just shows you how serious the Big Four banks here in Australia and just traditional institutions generally are about getting involved in the ecosystem,” McCall said.

McCall added that he’d seen a bit of pushback on social media about a traditional institution getting involved in crypto, but he saw that banks “absolutely” had a role to play in the decentralised space.

The Victor Smorgon Group is formed from the assets of billionaire Ukrainian-Australian industrialist Victor Smorgon AC, who died in 2009.

“Through the Zerocap platform and continuing our multi-generational working relationship with the ANZ Bank, we are excited to have an Australian dollar stablecoin facilitating innovation and investment,” said Victor Smorgon Group CEO Peter Edwards.

“The Victor Smorgon Group is a family business, working across multiple asset classes, following a thematic-based approach to asset allocation. Last year we took a strategic shareholding in Zerocap to make investments across the digital assets class.”

ANZ said it worked closely with leading providers in the digital asset domain including Fireblocks, Chainalysis and OpenZeppelin to create an in-house purpose-built stablecoin smart contract.

“We’re excited to continue to trial our capability and explore how this use case can be applied in other industries and customers in the future,” ANZ Banking Services Lead Nigel Dobson said.

Dobson said earlier at Blockchain Week that the bank was taking a “blockchain agnostic” approach and had also minted tokens on the Hedera Hashgraph testnet.