The head of regulatory relations for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East at Ripple, Sagar Sarbhai told CNBC that Ripple was making significant gains in the release of its product, xRapid. The cryptocurrency is set to assist banking by increasing transaction speeds using XRP.
Sarbhai stated in his interview, “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. A couple of years ago the narrative was: blockchain good, crypto bad. What we’re now seeing is more and more regulators, policymakers taking the whole space in one conjunction. So, I think that narrative thankfully is now changing because policymakers, regulators are seeing that there is a strong benefit that digital assets, cryptocurrencies bring in.”.
Using XRP as a gateway between various currencies, xRapid will be able to facilitate faster cross-border transactions between payment providers and banks. Previously individuals would have needed pre-funded local currency accounts in order to process a transaction between two currencies. xRapid would fasten the ordeal by converting a currency into XRP tokens which would then be moved overseas and then converted back into the fiat.
To bring xRapid to life, Ripple has partnered with corporate behemoths such as Santander, MoneyGram, American Express along with Western Union. These aforementioned corporations are yet to test the product in the wild. According to Sarbhai, over a hundred and twenty banking and financial institutions joined forces with Ripple to utilise its blockchain product xCurrent. Banks would use xCurrent to settle international transactions and to notify other banks when an international payment has been made instantly.
According to CoinMarketCap, XRP is currently worth 28 cents, although it did observe a high of $3 in 2017 which was a drastic rise from $0.006. XRP is currently the third most valuable digital asset with a market cap of $11.2 billion.
