stable coins

Story: Hyundai Card’s $20,000 USDT Test Sparks Ambitious Avalanche Payment Expansion

By Sakamoto Nashi

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The Pilot Was Real Funds, Real Firms. The project pulled in five players: Hyundai Card, Hyundai Motor, Tether, Avalanche, and Axiom — a…

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Why Avalanche, Why Now. Cross-border corporate payments have been a pain point for multinationals for a long time.

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What Comes Next Is Still Murky. Nam's comments about scalability are the clearest signal of intent.

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Hyundai Card wants more. After quietly running a real-money blockchain payment between two Hyundai subsidiaries, the South Korean financial arm of the automaker group is now…

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The test wasn't theoretical. Hyundai Card ran a $20,000 cross-border transaction between Hyundai Motor America and Hyundai Motor Mexico using Tether's USDT on the Avalanche…

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Seven minutes. For a payment that size, that's genuinely fast.

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The project pulled in five players: Hyundai Card, Hyundai Motor, Tether, Avalanche, and Axiom — a blockchain payments firm that helped execute the settlement.

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Heejung Nam, who leads payments and business development at Hyundai Card, was pretty direct about what comes next. The pilot proved the concept.

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That said, there's no timeline yet. No rollout date. No public commitment to a full deployment across the group.

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Cross-border corporate payments have been a pain point for multinationals for a long time. Traditional correspondent banking is slow, expensive, and layered with intermediaries.

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Read also: OpenAI Claims Justin Sun Prize with Major Math Breakthrough on Navier-Stokes Equations

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Hyundai Card's bet on Avalanche fits into a broader pattern. The network has been actively courting institutional and enterprise use cases, and it's not the only blockchain doing…

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The USDT piece matters too. Using Tether's stablecoin kept the transaction pegged to dollars on both ends, which is probably the only way a treasury team signs off on something…

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Nam's comments about scalability are the clearest signal of intent. The pilot was small — $20,000 is basically a rounding error for a company the size of Hyundai Motor Group.

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Axiom's role in the settlement process seems to be a key part of the answer. Blockchain payments firms like Axiom handle a lot of the messy middle layer — the part that doesn't…

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