What a week it has been for Ripple, XRP and the cryptocurrency market as a whole this week.
Bitcoin has broken $10,000 for the first time since January 2018 and there has been a flood of positive comments and announcements from Ripple and others in the industry.
After rumours had been circulating online for some time, it was confirmed earlier this week that Ripple had struck a deal to buy a stake in money transfer giant MoneyGram. Alex Holmes, Chairman and CEO of MoneyGram spoke of this deal by stating that “as the payments industry evolves and matures it is imperative that we continue to improve our platform and provide the most effective solution to get funds from point A to point B, through Ripple’s xRapid product we will have the ability to instantly settle funds from US Dollars to destination currencies on a 24/7 basis”.
Those of us in the XRP community are familiar with Ripple partnering with banks and payment providers worldwide however there was only ever evidence of them using xCurrent and therefore not utilising XRP. This allowed for the naysayers to spread FUD and at times quite toxic messages, so this partnership is most definitely different to the others.
Not only are MoneyGram the worlds second largest provider for money transfers, but it is confirmed they will be using XRP to settle transactions globally.
The day after news of the MoneyGram deal broke, Facebooked released the whitepaper for their cryptocurrency Libra. Without going into the technical information and specifics of Libra, one thing I believe we can all agree on is that this is positive news for the crypto industry. Facebook have gone from blocking ads promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings in January 2018 to releasing a whitepaper for their own cryptocurrency in just over 18 months. Facebook has over 2 billion active users and all these people will have access to cryptocurrencies, should their plans for Libra come to fruition.
There was talk leading up to the release of Libra’s whitepaper about how it would affect XRP and other coins in the market. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said that it was a fact that Facebook’s Libra announcement caused more banks to seriously consider using the company’s xCurrent banking payment software and associated XRP cryptocurrency to assist with transferring money across borders. Garlinghouse stated it has been a “call to action” and that “it has absolutely catalysed contract activity”, even joking that he would send a case of champagne to David Marcus, the guy who runs Libra.
It has most definitely been a milestone week for Ripple and the cryptocurrency space, and one thing that is becoming evident with each day that passes is that blockchain technology is the future, and XRP will play a big part in re-shaping current financial systems. We are still incredibly early, so be patient, make peace with your exit strategies and continue to learn and evolve!
Written by Dominic Zohreh
Twitter – domz_invests
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