Ripple Reveals xRapid Strategy, Says XRP Will Power Global Payments Revolution

The co-founder and executive chairman of Ripple is revealing his vision for how crypto and blockchain technology will disrupt the global payments industry.

At the Crypto Finance Conference in Half Moon Bay, California, Chris Larsen said he believes payments are blockchain’s killer app, and described how Ripple will utilize XRP to power payments around the world.

“For payments, which again we think are the killer app, we think that’s where it all starts. For payments, we think that has additional requirement. You’ve got to have settlement predictability. You’ve got to have consistent low costs. You’ve got to have high throughput…

xRapid, that’s a component of RippleNet. That allows payment providers to lower the cost and liquidity for their global payments. So it allows, for example, a bank that’s trying to send money to Mexico to use XRP as the intermediate currency. They don’t necessarily have to hold XRP, but it’s used to make things very efficient.

So in this example, a customer’s going to a remittance company in the US. Those dollars are now exchanged into XRP through Bittrex, which is a great exchange. It’s immediately settled in XRP in seconds. Bitso, an exchange, then provides the exchange between XRP and Mexican peso that can now be delivered to a Mexican bank, which, because they have a real-time system in Mexico, allows that to go into the customer’s account very quickly.

This now allows payment providers, banks and their customers to move value in one to two minutes versus days or a process that might mask those days but have to charge for the settlement risk and costs.”

Larsen says xRapid and the company’s suite of blockchain-based software solutions is designed to create a system that’s not only fast and inexpensive, but rock solid and secure, with essentially a zero rate of failure.

“The culmination of those products, RippleNet, allows enterprises, payment companies, remittance companies to enjoy on-demand, real-time payments in seconds incredibly low cost with, very importantly, no possibility for failures.

These are atomic transactions. They can’t fail in the mail. There’s no settlement risk. And that gives their customers a much better experience. So the banks and their customers, they know in today’s world they’ve got to be lightning fast. And this really allows them to do that.”