San Francisco-based FinTech firm Ripple played host to a Chinese delegation of academics, central bank officials and relevant industry officials at its headquarters in Silicon Valley.
FinTech startup Ripple, developer of the enterprise bank-friendly public blockchain platform RCL (Ripple Consensus Ledger), welcomed a delegation of noteworthy Chinese officials from the central bank and other government officials last week.
Headed by Huang Yiping, director of the Digital Finance Research Center at Peking University, the delegation included members of a number of government agencies including Yao Qian, director of the Central Bank Digital Currency Research Institute. As reported earlier, the People’s Bank of China – the country’s central bank – opened a new research lab to research and develop digital currencies last month. The ‘People’s Bank of China Digital Currency Institute’ is located in Beijing, sharing the same building of the state-owned China Banknote Printing and Minting corporation, the entity tasked to mint and print Chinese currency coins and banknotes.
Cross Border Remittance via Blockchain
According to a report by Chinese publication Weixin, the delegation was a part of a diplomatic exchange mission to promote financial technologies between China and the United States. The report reveals that the Chinese delegation was given a presentation on Ripple’s outlook of the global payments ecosystem and its own consensus ledger which promises significantly faster and cheaper cross-border remittance costs.
While details are scarce, Ripple said it discussed the ‘latest blockchain trends’ with Chinese officials.
Last September, Ripple launched the world’s first interbank blockchain group for global payments with the Global Payments Steering Group, described as a ‘rules-based blockchain payments network’ by the firm. Founded with six banks across three continents (North America, Europe and Australia), member banks will facilitate the creation and maintenance of payment transaction rules with formalized standards for money transfers over the Ripple blockchain. Earlier this year, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (BTMU), Japan’s largest bank, joined the group which will could soon see some 90 banks around the world participate in Ripple’s international payment network.
Ripple’s blockchain has already seen successful pilots and commercial implementations in banks across the world. A recently launched blockchain-powered remittance service between Japan and Thailand using Ripple tech facilitates money transfers in 2-5 seconds. A successful pilot by Spanish banking giant BVVA executed a money transfer between Spain and Mexico in seconds. In February, Abu Dhabi’s largest bank began offering blockchain cross-border payments using Ripple for its commercial users. Arguably, the most successful implementation of Ripple’s technology was announced in March this year after a consortium of 47 Japanese banks completed a money transfer pilot using the firm’s blockchain over a cloud infrastructure.
The team of Chinese officials also visited peer-to-peer lending platform Prosper; financial startup SoFi, a new-age financial lender notable for its student loan refinancing at low rates and; Circle, a former bitcoin startup that pivoted from the cryptocurrency in late 2016.
Meanwhile, Ripple’s public Monday tweet of hosting Chinese central banking officials, including the director of the central bank’s digital currency research institute, coincides with Ripple prices making marked gains on Tuesday.
Ripple’s value is up 10% on the day with nearly $600 million in trading of its native token XRP. At the time of publishing, Ripple is approaching a market cap of $8.5 billion, according to CoinMarketCap, making it the fourth largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.