Ripple could be on the verge of releasing its commercial version of its payment platform xRapid “in the next month or so,” CNBC reported yesterday, September 17th 2018. Head of regulatory relations for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East at Ripple, Sagar Sarbhai, told CNBC that Ripple has been making strides toward the launch of its product xRapid.
The xRapid product is a real-time settlement platform designed to speed up international payments. Built for commercial use and backed by XRP tokens, xRapid addresses the issues commonly brought up with the current international system of cross-border payment transactions, such as minimizing liquidity costs and speeding up international payments. xRapid claims to significantly reduce the capital requirements for liquidity. This may address XRP’s 20% move into the green in the last 24 hours as well. As of writing this article, XRP is currently at $0.332.
Sarbhai said in an interview with CNBC – “I am very confident that in the next one month or so you will see some good news coming in where we launch the product live in production.” He also noted that regulators’ approach to cryptocurrencies has been changing, positively, favoring blockchain whilst tempering its expectations of benefit for crypto.
In August, Ripple partnered with three crypto exchanges, Bittrex, Philippine Coins.Ph, and Mexican Bitso, as part of an xRapid solution to build a “healthy” ecosystem of digital asset exchanges. The new partnership will enable xRapid to facilitate moves between XRP, USD, Mexican Pesos, and Philippine Pesos.
This Spring, various financial institutions participated in a pilot of the xRapid platform, which tested payments between the United States and Mexico. The participants reported transaction savings of 40-70%. In addition to saving on costs, the parties involved remarked that there was an improvement in transaction speed – from the average 2-3 days via ACH to “just over two minutes”. Read more about xRapid please make the link read here.
We talked about how big financial institutions are gearing up to offer cryptocurrency based products to their consumers and clients here. Is this the next step that we’re seeing? Could we start seeing blockchain being utilized by financial institutions for their own operations? This would certainly aid in bringing blockchain to the masses. Where else have we seen movement on this? You got it. India
