BlockBeats news, on June 1, Travis John, Head of Institutional Business at XDC Network, stated that the global trade finance market is approximately $15 trillion, but the industry still heavily relies on paper documents, manual reviews, and multiple layers of intermediaries, leading to issues such as lengthy settlement cycles, high financing costs, and fraud risks.
According to the information, the XDC Network digitizes trade finance, cross-border settlement, and collateral management by tokenizing trade documents such as invoices and bills of lading, helping businesses reduce financing costs and improve settlement efficiency. XDC states that short-term trade financing rates for some small and medium-sized enterprises could potentially drop from as high as 30% via traditional channels to around 10%.
XDC notes that trade finance is currently a significant niche within real-world assets (RWA) and on-chain private credit, yet only about $700 million in global trade finance assets have been tokenized, indicating that adoption is still in its early stages. Following the passage of the GENIUS Act in 2025, the development of compliant stablecoins has further accelerated the deployment of on-chain trade settlement applications.
In addition, in 2025, XDC acquired the trade finance platform Contour Network, supported by over 100 financial institutions including HSBC, Citibank, and Standard Chartered, with plans to integrate stablecoin settlement capabilities into its existing trade finance network.