Klarna, the Sweden-based digital bank and payments provider popular for its “buy now, pay later” product, is making a foray into the stablecoin market.
The company announced on Tuesday, that it was launching its own stablecoin dubbed KlarnaUSD, a US dollar-pegged stablecoin it plans to tap into to bolster its traction across the cross-border payments market.
Leveraging KlarnaUSD and the blockchain rails that it offers will help the global digital bank bring faster and cheaper money transfers to its over 114 million customers.
The announcement comes amid a significant surge in stablecoin adoption, with the global trend seeing annual volumes surpass $27 trillion.
Klarna boasts over $112 billion in annual gross merchandise value, or GMV.
Commenting on the launch, Klarna’s co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, said:
With 114 million customers and $112 billion in annual GMV, Klarna has the scale to change payments globally: with Klarna’s scale and Tempo’s infrastructure, we can challenge old networks and make payments faster and cheaper for everyone.
Introducing KlarnaUSD, our first @Stablecoin.
We’re the first bank to launch on @tempo, the payments blockchain by @stripe and @paradigm.
With stablecoin transactions already at $27T a year, we’re bringing faster, cheaper cross-border payments to our 114M customers.
Crypto is
KlarnaUSD to go live in 2026
As noted, KlarnaUSD represents the Sweden-based company’s first foray into digital assets, and the leadership sees this as a step towards making a statement amid broader crypto adoption.
In the cross-border market, inefficiencies and challenges have included high costs and slow settlements or delays.
Stablecoins have largely addressed these, with blockchain technology allowing for near-instantaneous settlements at a fraction of the expense across traditional rails.
Klarna will debut its token in 2026 on Tempo, an independent blockchain developed by payments giant Stripe.
The project will utilise Open Issuance, a framework provided by Bridge, the Stripe-owned infrastructure platform for stablecoins.
“Crypto is finally at a stage where it is fast, low-cost, secure, and built for scale. This is the beginning of Klarna in crypto, and I’m excited to work with Stripe and Tempo to continue to shape the future of payments,” Siemiatkowski added.
Industry giants include Tether, Circle
Global giants such as Visa and SWIFT have all looked at stablecoins for the evolution of the payments ecosystem, while crypto native platforms such as Tether and Circle stand tall in bringing the solution to millions of users around the world.
Klarna joins the growing list of fintechs globally, accelerating this growth, and such efforts could consign the era of slow, costly cross-border payments to history. USDT and USDC are the two leading USD-pegged stablecoins today.
Tether’s global leader has a market cap of over $184 billion, while Circle’s USDC accounts for over $74 billion of the USD-pegged stablecoins in circulation.
Paxos, Ripple, PayPal and World Liberty Financial are other key players in the market, which have gained impetus since the GENIUS Act was passed into law in the US earlier this year.
According to the announcement, KlarnaUSD is currently live on Tempo’s testnet ahead of mainnet deployment in the coming months.
The testnet allows Klarna early access and time to undertake advanced testing, prototyping, and integration.
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