xRapid May Launch Next Month – XRP Prices Surge
Sagar Sarbhai, the head of regulatory relations, Asia-Pacific and Middle-East for Ripple announced that the company had progressed on the launch of its much awaited product, xRapid, to the point that it may even be launched next month.
What is xRapid?
xRapid is a real-time settlement platform which is being designed to increase the speed of transactions on international payments. This platform is backed by Ripple’s native token, XRP and is developed for commercial use.
The developers of xRapid claim that this platform will resolve the issue of reducing capital requirements for liquidity. This means that cross border payments would be significantly cheaper and also much faster than they currently are.
To enable the smooth functioning of the new platform, Ripple had entered into a partnership with three international cryptocurrency exchanges – Bittrex in the United States, Bitso in Mexico and Coins.Ph in the Philippines. With this new partnership in place, xRapid will be able to enable transactions between the XRP, the US Dollar, the Mexican Peso and the Philippine Peso seamlessly.
The platform conducted a pilot early this year, with multiple financial institutions participating in the beta test. The results showed a 40% to 70% savings on the cost of transactions. Additionally, transactions speeded up exponentially, reducing transaction times from 2 to 3 days to just 2 minutes.
Improving Regulatory Environment
Sarbhai also highlighted how the approach towards cryptocurrencies from regulators has changed in recent times, thus making it easier for platforms like xRapid to grow.
Regulators are now more neutral towards cryptos and are willing to look at the benefits that such digital assets have to offer, which is huge step forward from the previous stance they had adopted that Blockchain tech was good, but cryptocurrencies were bad.
XRP’s Price Soars
Despite the intensely bearish sentiment the cryptocurrency market is currently experiencing, the price of Ripple (XRP) shot up by more than 18%, before profit taking started pulling its price down once again. At the time of writing, the price of XRP is at $0.323244, an 18.51% jump in the last 24 hours.
While there didn’t seem to be any apparent reason for this sudden price hike, many are speculating that the announcement made about Ripple launching its xRapid platform in as soon as month was the reason for the two altcoins to show behavior contrary to the rest of the market’s performance.
The price of Ripple was also pushed up by the news that Saudi Arabia’s first established bank, the National Commercial Bank, became the latest major financial institution to join another Ripple platform, RippleNet.