Ripple’s xRapid Sees Over a Dozen Businesses Plan to Use XRP for Better Cross-Border Payments

With another slow week at the markets, it appears not much is happening. With Bitcoin [BTC] at the helm, driving prices to a modicum of stability.

However, there is always something going on behind the scenes. Recently, Ripple [XRP] slipped one spot down to 3^rd in terms of total market capitalisation. Despite this reportedly twelve companies from a broad spectrum of backgrounds have lodged strong interest in adopting the XRP based xRapid.

Independent of its market stature, xRapid and Ripple have been slowly and continuously making progress towards consolidating its offering. Collaborative efforts mean that the $14.6 billion worth coin has been able to carve a niche for itself as a safe and reliable blockchain in the financial services sector.

For XRP, Cross-Border Payments A Key Foci

In an attempt to differentiate itself and to get a strong foothold in the industry, Ripple has been looking to partner with banking and financial institutions from across the globe.

They have also tasted a fair amount of success with their in-house product, the cross border payment system, xRapid. The xRapid technology uses Ripples own coin XRP but is flexible enough to allow other options such as xVia and xCurrent.

This gives it a wider appeal, something that has prompted exchanges from as far as the Philippines, the Coins.ph, to ones in Mexico, the Bitso and even big players like Bittrex, to adopt xRapid. Along with that, Bitstamp has also confirmed its intention to use xRapid to accelerate their payment interactions. This comes at the heels of the massive expansion that XRP has seen by forging strong ties to the banking sector in the Iberian peninsula as well as the countries in South America.

Realising the opportunity, unsurprisingly, XRP has made payments and banking interactions their prime focus.

What Is xRapid

With continuous development and success xRapid is gaining a lot of attention from industry observers. Talking about their flagship product, Executive Chairman of Ripple, Chris Larsen had this to say,

“xRapid, that’s a component of RippleNet, that allows payment providers to lower the cost and liquidity for their global payments.”

Speaking to a gathering in California, he used an example to show how this technology lets a bank, from anywhere, to send money to Mexico. While the interaction would indeed use XRP as the intermediate currency neither ends need to actually hold XRP

Ripple Attracting The Right Kind Of Attention.

Success stories such as Western Union and Santandar have certainly helped matters and Ripple has been able to convince other platforms such as Cualliz and Mercury FX to use xRapid in order to process their payments more efficiently. This lets it function more as a bridge between the freedom that Satoshi's vision seeks and the stark rigidity the current banking system works under.

Furthermore this kind of partnership elevates the reputation of the technology. Therefore, more and more institutions are looking at incorporating blockchain into their ecosystem. This bodes well for both XRP and the industry at large.