“Over the last few months, I’ve spoken with ACTUAL banks and payment providers. They are indeed planning to use xRapid (our XRP liquidity product) in a serious way.” That was Brad Garlinghouse responding to the questioning of XRPs actual utility on Twitter. At the time it seemed like a pugnacious move for the CEO of Ripple to directly confront criticism of his strategy of partnering with financial institutions, but the announcement yesterday of two new partners using Ripple’s xRapid system has seemingly vindicated Mr. Garlinghouse.
One of the main points of contention when it came to assessing Ripple as a company and XRP as a cryptocurrency was the linkage between the software and platforms that Ripple is developing and the level at which XRP was a required part of these systems. The level of mistrust that rapidly developed among some elements of the cryptocurrency community centred around the idea that XRP was a way for Ripple to fund the company but not actually key to these payment systems. An idea that was often fuelled by wariness of centralisation and a conspiratorial edge that is often seen among early backers of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Indeed throughout 2017, as Ripple announced a number of new partners, there did seem to be some weight behind this position as it was unclear to what level XRP was being used by these initial partners as they trialled Ripple’s systems.
By contrast 2018 has started with a bang for Ripple. Compared to the year before Ripple has signed agreements with a number of new partners to trial their XRapid system with the explicit usage of XRP. The first piece of news to emerge was that Ripple had partnered with Moneygram to trial the usage of XRP as part of their payment systems and more recently Ripple announced partnerships with both IDT Corporation and MercuryFX. Though this is somewhat ironic timing, having come after XRP’s very rapid price rise and then fall during the Christmas period, it is nonetheless a big shift in Ripple’s story and potentially XRP’s Value propositions.
If Ripple can continue this trend and grow the list of its partners actively using XRP, then the dynamic that has currently existed in attempting to judge XRP’s value will completely change. Ripple has always forged its own path ahead in the cryptocurrency sphere. It has focused on financial institutions as potential partners rather than opponents to be toppled, not shied away from ditching mining as part of XRP’s design and focused on a very specific use case rather than trying to market themselves as a totally transformative technology. It looks like this strategy may be paying off.
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