XRP and Ripple Could Offer Blockchain-Based Financial Solutions to the Unbanked

Bitcoin (BTC) is the most popular digital currency and it has reached a large part of the population. However, XRP is the third largest digital asset and it has a lot to offer to those unbanked around the world. With its broader remittance services, Ripple can make international payments something easy, fast and efficient.

Ripple Could Offer Services To Unbanked Individuals

Ripple and virtual currencies have been adopted around the world by many financial institutions and companies. The main intention is to replace traditional cross-border payment solutions and offer faster and efficient mechanisms to send and receive transactions.

According to Roel Wolfert, Managing Partner at VGRIP, commented that by reducing cross-border transaction times, it is possible to attract users that are usually unbanked.

By slashing cross-border remittance times to minutes, #blockchain-enabled services are attracting users who typically aren’t banked. https://t.co/dNjCxahdNJ pic.twitter.com/t2kEgeZ3Gy

— Ripple (@Ripple) April 18, 2019

The adoption of XRP and Ripple is one of the reasons why virtual currencies are getting more attention from other companies, individuals and media. At the moment, Ripple has partnered with over 200 companies around the world that are using Ripple’s services. The number of these firms keeps growing as week after week.

One of the latest products released by Ripple is xRapid, which allows interest clients to process transactions by sourcing liquidity on-demand. That means that a firm or individual can send a payment with its local currency to another country and receive the local fiat currency in just a matter of seconds using XRP to provide liquidity. There are some firms already working with this service, Bitso, Coins.ph, and Bitstamp.

Moreover, the Interledger protocol is also helping increase Ripple adoption. With it, it is possible to send payments across different ledgers, making it suitable for the Internet of Value (IoV). It also creates a bridge between virtual and fiat currencies.

In addition to it, interested users are able to send small tips with the independently developed XRP Tip Bot. There are different platforms that can use this implementation, including Gmail, Reddit, Twitter and Telegram. Thus, the XRP Tip Bot has helped increase crypto adoption around the world.

Additionally, the XRP community, which is known for being very active on social media, has been trying to be added to Skype as a means of payments for phone calls. Users are also asking Skype to allow users to send each other funds with XRP. Although Skype informed that they have no plans until now, Microsoft is exploring distributed ledger technology (DLT) solutions.

Finally, Ripple has also been involved in very important community events. That includes the donation of $1 million to Tipping Point in order to help the nonprofit fight poverty. This is just one of the many charitable initiatives that are currently linked to Ripple. A report released by Ripple reads as follows:

“Ripple employees are eager to support Tipping Point and its grantees through their personal giving. Ripple already matches its employees’ donations to any nonprofit on a dollar-for-dollar basis.”

At the time of writing this article, XRP is being traded around $0.33 and it has a market capitalization of $13.84 billion.