“Ripple already has a significant client base in the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region and the opportunity to co-locate with our customers made DIFC a natural choice,” said Navin Gupta, a managing director at Ripple. “Our regional office will serve as a springboard to introduce our blockchain based solutions and deepen our ties with even more financial institutions in the region.”

The DIFC special economic zone houses more than 2,500 companies across Middle East,  Africa, and South Asia is an “independent regulator” with a proven judicial system.

Company’s executives plan on moving the company’s headquarters in San Francisco to a country with greater regulatory clarity than that of the United States. Ripples plans on moving the headquarters to possibly Japan and Singapore as new potential locations for it’s  new HQ.

The DIFC offers blockchain firms like Ripple no taxes on corporate income and profits for at least 50 year. The DIFC is based in Dubai, a multi commodities centre -the largest free zone in UAE.

Volatility increases for XRP

The whole crypto world has seen lots of volatility in the market, some crypto assets that were thought would not do well or increase. XRP on it’s own has seen great volatility and a market report dated back to November 5, XRPs volatility was high, even as high as surprising BTC and ETH. This represents an increase in volatility from Q1 and Q3.

XRP is a digital asset built for payments. It is the native digital asset on the XRP Ledger—an open-source, permissionless and decentralized blockchain technology that can settle transactions in 3-5 seconds.

XRP can be sent directly without needing a central intermediary, making it a convenient instrument in bridging two different currencies quickly and efficiently.

The company is the parent company of the fourth largest crypto by market capitalization XRP, it is valued at $10 billion. The report showed that it was behind Strip which is valued at $36 billion, Lufax valued at $39.4 billion, and the Indian-based Paytm One97 valued at $16 billion.

Ripple’s arm RippleNet is a network of institutional payment providers using solutions that are developed by the parent company Ripple, to provide a seamless experience to send money world-wide.

The company also has the On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) tool, Ripples XRP-powered product that enables cross-border payments across Europe, Mexico, The Philippines, United States, and Australia.

Ripply raised $200 million through a series C funding round initiated by SBI Group, Tetragon, and Route 65 Ventures. Ripple also announced their purchase of a $50 million stake in remittance platform MoneyGram.

Ripple has grown a lot in partnerships especially with centralized entities like banks or payment systems. Some of those Partnerships or relationships include : Banco Santander, Barclays PLC, Royal Bank of Canada, and Toronto Dominion Bank. Other top banks include Europe’s banking giant, HSBC Holding, and Japan Post Bank.

Ripple

Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network created by Ripple Labs Inc., a US-based technology company. Ripple is the only enterprise blockchain company today with products in commercial use by hundreds of customers across 55+ countries. These businesses have access to alternative liquidity solutions through Ripple’s global network, which uniquely uses the XRP Ledger and its native digital asset XRP to help improve payments services worldwide.
Our solutions unify the infrastructure underlying global payments. But it doesn’t stop there. Through the power of decentralized financial technology, institutions and the businesses and people they serve have access to an open and inclusive system no matter where they are in the world.

Payburner is a plug-in which enables the delivery of internet based payments. It will allow peer-to-peer payments and e-commerce. The beta just launched will enable instant global peer-to-peer payments, it will allow users to send and receive payments via PayID. Users are allowed to set up the PayID when signing up and can be shared when receiving funds from anyone. You could also request payment by inputting the PayID of the person you are requesting payment from, type in the amount and you could add an optional message and send it.

Dewitt explained on the twitter thread that the beta offers a one-click e-commerce payment capabilities. Merchants who are to benefit from this e-commerce must have an account with payburner where he will receive funds. With Payburner, one can easily receive XRP payments.

Charges

We expect to make money from the one-click merchant payout experience by requesting payments from merchants at 1% of their received XRP e-commerce purchases. Peer to peer payments and peer to peer requests are not charged any fee.Payburner does not have the ability to withdraw funds from any account and we are not in the middle of any transactions, so we send requests to merchants for fee collection.”

The medium article released in this regard stated that they are already supported in the top browsers which are Google Chrome and Brave Browser. You can also get the plug-in on WordPress, this makes it available to over 45 million websites.

These funds will allow investors with a Crypto asset fund that embodies the resources of the SBI Group. 

The SBI Holdings plans on allocating 50% for XRP, 30% Bitcoin (BTC) and 20% Ethereum (ETH). They also stated that the sales of the fund shares to investors will be handled by the SBI securities and SBI Money plaza while the creation and handling of funds in partnership with an entity (Anonymous) would be handled by the SBI. The SBI Crypto trading operation, SBI VC Trade will have custody of the Crypto assets.

SBI and Ripple

The Japanese financial giant has been in partnership with Ripple for a very long time, they also invested in the project back in 2016.

JRNY Crypto reported that the SBI holdings will be partnering with Ripple to launch the Ripple Remittance platform, a platform believed to be a game-changer in the remittance world.

SBI Ripple Asia Chief Executive Adam Traidman in an interview with Tony Edward on his YouTube channel Thinking Crypto, it was revealed that the company is currently testing the product with the aim of releasing it in a matter of months.

ODL is a solution that changes the fundamental layers of the banking system and how money is moved and that technology is super exciting. It’s just rolling out now, for SBI Ripple Asia we have limited trial and pilot projects going on right now with various companies in our territories, and they’re going great.

I expect that probably later this year and into next year things are going to move into widespread production, and I expect remittance companies that were restricted in growth because of pre-funding requirements to have a lot more flexibility.”

The ODL platform is said to have already started gaining traction and attention from those within those regions. Adam goes on to explain why it’s gaining this much attention and also refers to the platform as a game-changer in the Remittance space.

There are customers of SBI Ripple Asia that are starting to leverage ODL technology for Ripple…

ODL changes everything. ODL means that you can basically convert your yen in real time into XRP in Japan, send it over to Vietnam over the public XRP blockchain, then convert it in real time to [Vietnamese] dong so you’re not subject to these currency fluctuations, and then that dong can be made available to my family member in Vietnam.”

You can see the Interview here.

After news that China has over 70% of Bitcoin mining power, we got the news that Trump administration and the White House have been in discussion about Cryptocurrency and specifically Ripple XRP.

Although this sounds far fetched and President Trump would likely never promote any crypto or implement using it, there is a possibility that they may support it over Bitcoin, Ethereum and other currencies. If China has the majority share of mining power for both Bitcoin and Ethereum, then the United States is going to be missing out of a massive amount of wealth in yet another area.

With xRapid just going live, we are yet to see many companies using XRP, but Brad Garlinghouse (Ripple CEO) has stated that by end of year 2019, they will have dozens of banks using xRapid and XRP for cross border payments. Not only that, but their xPring program is constantly getting new use cases for XRP and Codius is quickly picking up traction as well.

It would be crazy to see Trump and US govt adopt Ripple and XRP, but there has been many predictions of XRP becoming a world currency and premier digital asset. With China having the majority share of other top 2 cryptos, Ripple and XRP are a very valid candidate.

Imagine what would happen if Trump announced support of XRP in a tweet! Maybe that $589 end of year price prediction by Bearableguy123 are possible after all?

In this article I want to discuss some important features of the Ripple business that will inevitably create a snowball effect that will launch Ripple and it’s currency XRP into the stratosphere.

At the end of 2017, Ripple officially announced it’s 55 Billion XRP escrow that would lock up the XRP into monthly contracts of 1 Billion XRP each. Every month that passes, a new contract will unlock and give Ripple access to 1 Billion XRP to use for further developing the business, as well as marketing and anything else they need funding for in that month. Any XRP that isn’t used in that month will get locked into a new contract and be put at the back of the XRP escrow rotation. Ripple will then receive that remaining XRP when that month comes into rotation again.

So this escrow will end up lasting much longer than 5 years and is basically a never ending funding source for Ripple, making them The Behemoth of the crypto world.

Ripple has already made it.

They have hundreds of huge partnerships world-wide and have all the funding they will ever need. XRP is the cryptocurrency with the most real world use now and will continue to gain dominance in the cryptocurrency market.

Ashton Kutcher donates 4 Million to Elen on Ripple’s behalf

Ripple has been making huge donations to many charitable causes in the world and it’s getting covered in mainstream media. This is giving Ripple exposure to millions of new people and for the first time ever, Ripple is getting more coverage than Bitcoin.

Ripple recently donated 4 Million USD to a wildlife foundation of Elen Degeneres’s choice. Not only did they get exposure on the Elen show, but they also got Ashton Kutcher to make the donation on their behalf. This also got more exposure because Ashton shared this video on his social media pages.

This is only the beginning of Ripple’s generous donations and not only will it continue to build their brand and gain exposure, but also improve the world.

Ripple had also made a $29 Million dollar donation to DonorsChoose.org, which got them coverage on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Institutional Money is Coming

Recently, LMAX has launched the first physical institutional exchange geared towards institutional investors. This exchange has done over $10 Trillion in FIAT and is now offering a means for their investors to invest in select cryptos, including XRP, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin.

With all the new partnerships that Ripple has gained and all the real world use they are generating, it is no question which cryptocurrency the institutional investors will want to put their money in. These are people that are already invested in companies that Ripple is now partnered with as well.

Over time we will start to see more and more institutional exchanges going live and more money being invested into cryptocurrency.

Although cryptos are very volatile, they also are very high reward if you invest at the right time. With the business structure and features that Ripple has, we can expect most institutional investors to favor Ripple XRP.