Ripple is revealing new details on the expansion of its XRP-based cross-border remittance platform called On-Demand Liquidity (ODL).
The company’s head of global operations, Eric van Miltenburg, confirmed ODL is coming to two additional countries.
In a new interview after Ripple’s recent Swell conference in Singapore, he confirmed reports from the conference that ODL is coming to Australia, and revealed Thailand will also launch in 2020.
“We launched Mexico last year. We launched Philippines after that. Yesterday, on stage we announced Australia was coming online.
And there’s a list of countries that are on the roadmap. Thailand being one for 2020.”
Miltenburg says Ripple is taking its time and exercising a lot of caution when launching ODL in new markets due to concerns about regulatory clarity.
“Depending on the jurisdiction around the world, regulators have different views on how to use digital assets.
For example, in the extreme you look at China or India and they’re not friendly towards digital assets. Other markets have more progressive stances.
And so, we’ve been cautious to launch in markets where we can ensure that our customers are comfortable that there is regulatory clarity [and] they don’t need to worry about anything.”
Ripple launched ODL back in October of 2018 under the name xRapid.
It’s designed to use XRP as a bridge currency to move fiat across borders in a matter of minutes.
It works by utilizing crypto exchanges that can accept fiat from financial institutions and send the equivalent value in XRP to another exchange overseas, where it’s converted back to the local currency.
The amount of time the assets are held in XRP is designed to last a matter of seconds to keep volatility low.