Ripple's Xpring Reveals New Push to Expand XRP Ecosystem

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The leader of Ripple’s fundraising arm Xpring is revealing new details on how the initiative is working to expand the development and adoption of the digital asset XRP.

Xpring is widely known for investing in a variety of blockchain companies that could play a role in pushing the real world use of XRP.

But on the latest episode of The Ripple Drop, Ripple’s senior vice president of Xpring, Ethan Beard, says the initiative is also directly developing tools to help grow the XRP ecosystem.

“One of the areas that I’m most excited about is that we’re really starting to layer in developer tools inside of Xpring and looking to make Xpring much more of a developer platform. So the team has significantly grown. We’re probably 10x what we were a year ago in terms of people. The vast, vast majority of the team is engineers. What we’re putting in place is the tooling to make it really simple to build with XRP.

We’re building out APIs, SDKs and various libraries and services to make it so that anyone who wants to come along and build on XRP can do so very easily. And then we’ll also be spending a lot of time bringing these products to market and reaching developers wherever they are around the world. So keep your eyes open. You may even see an Xpring developer conference somewhere along the line as well.”

So far, Xpring has invested at least $500 million in more than 20 blockchain and crypto-related companies.

Xpring recently revealed it’s awarded a grant to the micropayments startup Coil, and will give the company 1 billion XRP to build out its business model of helping creators monetize their content on the web.

Ripple also created a $100-million fund with the blockchain gaming company Forte, which will be used to bring digital assets like XRP to thriving mainstream video games with large numbers of daily active users.

Here’s a look at some of Xpring’s other investments.

Kava Labs, which is developing an open payment system for cryptocurrencies
Dharma Protocol, which aims to create a crypto-based decentralized loan platform
Raised in Space Enterprises, a startup that plans to use digital assets like XRP to revitalize the music industry
XRPL Labs, a new company created by the avid XRP developer Wietse Wind
Robot Ventures in March, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in fintech and crypto companies
SendFriend, which will use Ripple’s XRP-based payment solution xRapid to lower the cost of sending money overseas