Ripple is unstoppable after having the past few months full of positive events for the project. The cryptocurrency has increased its value from $0.46 to a current daily high of $0.57 – which is nearly a 20% rise – in a matter of 24 hours.
Ripple’s current market cap is $21.6 B, very close to replacing Ethereum for the second-biggest cryptocurrency, following last month’s flippening.
On our report from 10 days ago, Ripple has achieved significant progress in boosting its ecosystem with new partnerships, solutions, and more. On October 23, the organization’s cryptocurrency has got a dedicated exchange, which is entirely XRP-based. A day before, a digital currency loan platform – Nexo – has added the coin as a collateral option for the service’s instant crypto loans.
While the cryptocurrency exchange Changelly has added support for XRP and another exchange Coinbase has been provided an NYDFS license for custody services for the third largest coin, Ripple has been on the rise with new partnerships. The most significant of them all is the organization’s rumored partnership with the National Bank of Kuwait. However, other institutions, such as Sri Lanka’s ComBank and the Texas-based Catalyst Corporate Federal Credit Union, are exploring Ripple’s payment services.
A few days ago, Ripple’s xRapid – the company’s low-cost and fast cross-border payments solution – enriched with a new partner, SendFriend. Although it’s still in early access, several organizations – including cryptocurrency exchanges Bittrex and Bitso as well as the currency specialist Mercury Fx – have requested access to Ripple’s cross-border payment solution.
While most of Ripple’s xRapid partners are running centralized solutions, SendFriend is a remittance platform based on the blockchain. SendFriend seeks to reduce the costs as well as the time it takes to send a transaction to friends and families for people working in overseas countries. To improve its services as well as the overall experience for its customers, SendFriend has joined as a partner to xRapid. SendFriend’s solution is backed by prominent names, including MIT Media Lab, Barclays, TechStars, MasterCard Foundation, Mahindra Finance, and Deloitte.
SendFriend CEO David Lighton stated that their partnership with Ripple would allow a higher efficiency with capital on the backend of his company. According to Mr. Lighton, xRapid would allow SendFriend to conduct real-time settlements without any pre-funding and without the need to manage foreign exchange fees.
During the Global Islamic Economic Summit 2018 last week, the company behind the third-largest cryptocurrency announced plans to open an office in the United Arab Emirates – more precisely in Dubai – at the end of the year. Ripple’s Global Head of Infrastructure Innovation Dilip Rao stated that his company seeks to fully enter the Asian and the Middle Eastern market in the near future, and they will open up the Dubai office to serve as the base of operations for these two markets.
According to Mr. Rao: “Ripple’s cost-efficient, flexible, and cheap solutions will allow his company to align with the UAE’s plans on implementing blockchain tech for a wide range of applications.”, He emphasized that it is “fantastic” that the UAE government seeks to move half of its transactions to the blockchain by 2020, which is expected to encourage innovation.
“If you want to send this money, particularly you’re not clear about what the fees are going to be that the bank is going to charge on the other end. And therefore, what you’ll receive might be substantially less than what you sent out.
And if you’re sending money for blue collar workers, this often can be a small amount of money, $200, and the fees for these kinds of small payments can be as high as 5 to 10%. So this is hurting the people who can afford it the least,” Mr. Rao added about the importance of cost-efficiency for blue collar workers.
According to Mr. Rao, the Middle Eastern market is of high importance for Ripple since there is a high demand for cost-efficient and fast cross-border payment solutions as many of the workers are foreigners who send a part of their salaries back to their families and friends. He added that Ripple is fully entering the Middle Eastern market – where they have numerous institutions as partners, including Saudi Arabia’s Al-Rajhi Bank and the Kuwait Finance House – that will support the economy.
