Ripple’s XRP has mostly been touted as a means for cross-border payments part of the XRP Ledger. But it appears that people have found some interesting, unexpected, and, quite frankly, rather cool uses of the cryptocurrency.
It’s worth noting, though, that other coins, such as BTC and ETH, would probably do a similarly good job for the use case in question.
It was brought up as a response to a Twitter threat by the popular lawyer John Deaton. He represents tens of thousands of XRP holders in the case against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
The case in point is using XRP for booking a private jet or sharing one with your millionaire friends. As ridiculous as it may sound, the company offering this service – TapJets – has even provided an amicus brief in the Ripple case, explaining that XRP was actually solving the so-called Friday Night Problem.
This refers to customers being unable to pay for various services through a banking channel because, well, banks don’t work on a Friday night.
Deaton explained that TapJets is pretty much like Uber, but for flights, and if someone needs a last-minute flight, they can use the company and reserve a jet – it happens almost instantly. They’d have to pay for the fuel, the pilots, the flight attendants, airport fees, and everything. So, say, you want to party in Las Vegas on a Friday night and spend a few hundred thousand dollars, but you have no transport, and you have no way of paying for a jet because banks don’t work.
It turns out that TapJets accepts XRP and, as we know, blockchain systems don’t have a day off.
