Thanks very much Andrew, and agree, very hard to gauge how much...

Thanks very much Andrew, and agree, very hard to gauge how much of an impact the partnership could add to the bottom line, especially given that the Stellar network is a not-for-profit foundation aiming to provide a very lost cost platform (the equivalent of 1 'penny' for 300,000 transfers).

But despite my limited knowledge on all this, and the fact that it's all at such an early stage,  IBM's decision to partner up it seems to make it all the more compelling in terms of future use. There's been a lot of comment from industry experts on the tie-up between multinational computing giant, major banks and start-up Stellar to create realtime multi-currency cross-border transactional networks for the finance industry.

From the youtube talk by Jesse Lund and Jed McCaleb it seems clear that this is not an unwieldy, anarchic bitcoin-driven fad, but a serious attempt to link billions of consumers with banks, remittance companies and eventually central banks, in system that can handle the same of number of transactions per second as the Swift network.

From the original announcement 13/11/17, this line seems significant:

Novatti is also in a position to use its balance sheet to be a significant liquidity provider on the Stellar network and benefit from additional margins and by way of crypto tokens available to such participants.

Stellar's head of strategic partnerships in China tweeted out congratulations to Novatti after previous announcement:



Another recent chat with Jesse Lund that contains some more interesting comments on IBM's plans for blockchain/Stellar payments



Look forward to seeing it go live this month, hopefully we will soon get a better idea on how much traction it gains based on media coverage/consumer uptake. Cheers!