Very positive news for Ripple holders today: Sagar Sarbhai, Head of Regulatory Relations for Ripple in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions, told CNBC that the release of xRapid is near. According to Sarbahi the firm believes xRapid could launch in a month or so. The product, xRapid, is a commercial application that uses the cryptocurrency XRP as a kind of “bridge” between currencies, allowing payment providers and banks to process faster cross-border transactions.
Ripple has been criticised by many people in the crypto space for a long time: XRP wasn’t centralised and furthermore Ripple was not pushing the use of XRP to its clients. Luckily, for XRP holders, this is about to change with the release of xRapid.
Sagar Sarbhai said to 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.”
The product, xRapid, uniquely uses the digital asset, XRP, to offer on-demand liquidity, which dramatically lowers costs while enabling real-time payments in emerging markets. Built for enterprise use, XRP offers banks and payment providers a highly efficient, scalable, reliable liquidity option to service cross-border payments.
With xRapid, Ripple aims to make XRP the asset of choice for cross-border settlements between financial institutions. Up till now Ripple only had a product called xCurrent available, which uses blockchain technology to decrease settlement time but does not make use of XRP. Because of this, many cryptocurrency investors believed XRP was useless. With xRapid, this will no longer be the case.
In August Ripple announced that it selected three cryptocurrency exchanges — Bittrex, Bits, and Coins.ph — to serve as preferred partners for the xRapid ecosystem. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse predicted earlier this year that “dozens” of banks would be using xRapid — and by extension XRP — by the end of 2019.
According to Sarbhai, more than 120 banks and financial institutions located worldwide are currently using the firm’s xCurrent product. The challenge will be to convince those firms to upgrade to xRapid, even as many financial institutions remain cautious on or even outright hostile toward cryptocurrency. If Ripple succeeds, however, this will give XRP a huge boost and there is no doubt that the price of XRP will then go to new highs.
