Ripple’s incubator Xpring, an initiative that helps innovative blockchain projects secure funding and partnerships, is investing $750,000 into mobile wallet provider BRD.
BRD is one of the fastest-growing mobile cryptocurrency wallets. It has more than 2.5 million users in 170 different countries. The company is experiencing rapid growth in key areas, including a steady increase in monthly active users and transaction volume.
Ripple says companies like BRD want to use XRP because it solves scalability problems that have not yet been resolved by Bitcoin developers. In turn, the investment will support Ripple’s ongoing efforts to build “the internet of value.”
Says Suneet Wadhwa, head of strategic partnerships at Ripple,
“BRD will build on Xpring to support and integrate XRP into the BRD wallet, which will enable their customers to hold, buy/sell, spend, and send XRP to anyone in the world.”
BRD gives users complete control over their funds through its non-custodial wallet, enabling new types of decentralized financial services, including decentralized banking, lending and peer-to-peer transactions that can be conducted on the XRP Ledger. Ethan Beard, senior vice president at Xpring, says these features can promote the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies.
BRD transactions that run on the XRP Ledger cost fractions of a penny and are reportedly confirmed in only four seconds.
While second-layer scaling solutions such as the Lightning Network are working to improve Bitcoin’s slower transaction speed and increase the number of transactions per second, the average confirmation time for BTC in September was 10.8 minutes, according to data compiled by Statista.
According to Wadhwa,
“In the crowded wallets arena, we view the founders as the people pushing the boundaries of innovation in the space. We think [BRD] has the right team, technologies and consumer-first approach required to drive mainstream adoption of XRP across a myriad of new use cases.”
Earlier this month, the BRD team revealed it would add support for XRP after Xpring introduced a software development kit for adding XRP and fiat payments into various applications.
BRD also supports Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ether (ETH), ERC-20 compliant tokens and the stablecoin DAI.