Quick answer: In October 2017, IBM, the nonprofit Stellar.org, and the payments company KlickEx Group announced a blockchain-based cross-border payments solution that was already processing live transactions across 12 currency corridors in the Pacific Islands, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. It ran on the IBM Blockchain Platform using Hyperledger Fabric, with the Stellar network handling settlement. It was one of the first times a public blockchain was used in production to move money across multiple integrated currency corridors.
Updated 07/17/2026. By Jake Claver. Educational content, not investment advice.
Cross-border payments are one of the oldest problems in finance: they are slow, expensive, and error-prone, and correspondent banking adds layers of intermediaries that each take time and a fee. The 2017 IBM, Stellar, and KlickEx partnership is worth revisiting because it was not a whitepaper or a pilot in a sandbox. It was a live production network moving real money, and it is a concrete data point in the longer story of tokenized settlement, rather than a broad assertion about where the technology might go.
What IBM, Stellar, and KlickEx actually announced
On October 16, 2017, IBM announced the solution with Stellar.org and KlickEx Group, per IBM’s own newsroom release and the matching PR Newswire distribution. The stated goal was to reduce settlement time and lower the cost of completing global payments for businesses and consumers, replacing a process that can take days or weeks with settlement in near real time.
The scale claim was specific: the network was designed to process up to 60 percent of all cross-border payments in the South Pacific’s retail foreign-exchange corridors, including Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga. Fourteen major banks were named as participants, among them National Australia Bank, TD Bank, Mizuho Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Bank Mandiri, and Bank Danamon Indonesia.
How the solution worked
The architecture combined two layers. The IBM Blockchain Platform, built on Hyperledger Fabric, handled the permissioned business logic and bank-facing workflow. The Stellar network provided the settlement layer, with its native digital asset acting as a bridge between currencies so that a payment in one currency could settle into another without a chain of correspondent banks in between.
Stellar’s own announcement described the network as the core backbone of the solution and framed it as the first time public blockchain technology was used in production to facilitate cross-border payments across multiple integrated currency corridors. At launch it was already live across 12 corridors.
Why the banks and corridors mattered
A public blockchain moving test transactions is easy. Getting named, regulated banks to route real customer payments over it is the hard part, and that is what made the 2017 launch notable. The South Pacific corridors were a deliberate choice: they are high-cost, low-volume routes where the inefficiency of correspondent banking is most painful, and where faster, cheaper settlement has a direct effect on remittances and small-business trade.
This is the same problem that drives networks like Ripple and its bank partnerships. Different networks have taken different technical routes, but the target is shared: compress the time and cost of moving value across borders by shortening the settlement chain.
Where this fits in the tokenization story
The IBM/Stellar/KlickEx work is an early production example of a broader theme that central banks and standard-setters have since taken seriously. The Bank for International Settlements, in its 2023 report Blueprint for the future monetary system, describes tokenization as representing claims digitally on a programmable platform and sketches a unified ledger where central bank money, tokenized deposits, and other assets can settle together. Cross-border payments are one of the clearest use cases in that blueprint.
Public-sector research has run in parallel. MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston ran Project Hamilton, which explored the technical feasibility of a hypothetical US central bank digital currency. Regulators have also been building the rulebook: in the United States, the CFTC’s digital assets resources lay out how parts of the crypto and tokenized-asset market are treated under existing law. The 2017 launch sits at the front of that timeline, before most of the policy framework existed.
Why this matters
For anyone trying to separate durable infrastructure from hype, production deployments with named banks are the signal worth tracking. The IBM, Stellar, and KlickEx solution showed that a public blockchain could handle regulated, cross-border settlement at real scale, and it did so years before tokenization became a mainstream policy topic. That does not make any token a good investment, and it says nothing about price. It is a technology-and-adoption story, and it should be read separately from any investment thesis.
Common questions
What did IBM, Stellar, and KlickEx announce in 2017?
On October 16, 2017, IBM, Stellar.org, and KlickEx Group announced a blockchain-based cross-border payments solution that was already processing live transactions across 12 currency corridors in the Pacific Islands, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, with settlement in near real time.
What blockchain did the IBM, Stellar, and KlickEx solution use?
It combined the IBM Blockchain Platform, built on Hyperledger Fabric, for the permissioned bank workflow, with the Stellar network for settlement. Stellar’s native digital asset acted as a bridge between currencies so payments could settle without a long chain of correspondent banks.
Which banks took part in the IBM and Stellar payments network?
IBM named 14 major banks as participants, including National Australia Bank, TD Bank, Mizuho Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Bank Mandiri, and Bank Danamon Indonesia, across the Asia-Pacific region.
Why was the South Pacific chosen for the launch?
The South Pacific has high-cost, low-volume payment corridors where correspondent banking is especially slow and expensive. The network was designed to process up to 60 percent of retail foreign-exchange cross-border payments in corridors including Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, where faster and cheaper settlement has a direct effect on remittances and trade.
How does this relate to tokenization and CBDCs?
It is an early production example of using a blockchain for cross-border settlement, a use case central banks now study closely. The BIS has proposed a unified ledger built on tokenization, and MIT and the Boston Fed explored a hypothetical US CBDC through Project Hamilton. The 2017 launch predates most of that policy work.
This content is educational only. It is not tax, legal, or investment advice. Check primary sources and speak with a qualified professional before making financial decisions.
