Ripplers will be quick to confirm that there has been no major partnership announcement by the Ripple (XRP) team for quite some time. The last significant one was when Santander announced it was using Ripple’s xCurrenty payment solution platform to ease international money transfers back on the 12th of April. The product by the bank is called One Pay FX and is available for customers in Spain, UK, Brazil and Poland.
What do we know so far about Ripple?
Firstly, Ripple has partnered with between 40 – 50 Central banks and over 100 banks in general. Ripple’s CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, was noted as saying in a Bloomberg interview, that he had lost track of the exact number of the partnerships and would only announce them when they were a total of 200.
Secondly, the recent xRapid tests once again proved that Ripple products are not only cost effective, but they reduce a regular 2 – 3 bank transfer transaction, to a mere 2 minutes. Financial institutions were seen saving between 40 – 70% as compared to what they paid foreign exchange brokers for the same transactions.
Thirdly, Moneygram and Western Union are known partners of Ripple and intend on using the xRapid payment solution that has been mentioned above. Perhaps the above tests were with respect to the two international money remittance providers. The tests were carried out between the countries of Mexico and the United States. Therefore, it is highly likely that the financial institutions mentioned were Moneygram and Western Union because not too many individuals remit money from the United States to other countries using banks. Most use these two companies or even World Remit and Wave.com.
Fourthly, Ripple has nothing else to prove in terms of offering superior technology for cross border payments. It has superior products in xVia, xRapid and xCurrent. What else is there to showcase?
So why has the parent company been so quiet?
The only logical conclusion is that the crypto-verse is being prepared for a major announcement sometimes soon.
But what will the announcement be?
This is a hard question to answer for not too many people are privy of such confidential information held by crypto-projects. Perhaps a precurser of the anticipated announcement is the release of Rippled 1.0.0-rcl on Github by Ripple C++ Developer, Nik Bougalis.
Only time will reveal what is in store for the mighty Ripple!