XRP is the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap in something of a battle for the spot with Ethereum over the last year. XRP has its share of fans and haters when it launched it promised to disrupt the international payment settlement industry and bring low fee high-speed transfers to financial institutions.
Ripple is getting a lot of attention right now and not just here on our channel. It seems that the good news keeps on rolling in for XRP hodlers but with as much good news as there seems to be there seems to be just as much FUD being thrown its way, so it can be difficult keeping up with all of the positive developments in the company. Which is why in today’s video I'm going to talk about why the worlds financial systems need Ripple and the top reasons why Ripple’s price is bound to Moon but in 2019 are we allowed to say moon? Nevermind, to find out more let's take a look
To really see the advantages that Ripple offers then you first need to understand what banks are currently doing when they send your money abroad.
In traditional banking in order to make international payments, a bank has to hold a pre-funded foreign account in the destination country. This is what Nostro/Vostro accounts are used for. Vostro is Italian for yours and Nostro means ours.
In order to send money from Bank USA to Bank India, Bank USA has to have a Nostro account with Bank India that is pre-funded with a lot of Rupees. In turn, Bank USA needs to have a Vostro account where they hold Dollars on behalf of Bank India. This setup required months of organization for banks and financial institutions to set up between countries and resulted in the need for large amounts of capital to be locked up in Nostro and Vostro accounts which leads to liquidity issues.
The reason that transfers can take up to 5 days is that the process that the payments go through to get from one bank to another. If Bank USA has a direct relationship with Bank India the process is pretty straight forward and can be done during business hours within the same day. The bank isn’t sending any money to Bank India, Bank USA is using the SWIFT secure messaging system to send payment instructions to Bank India (hence the term wire transfer), the payment is then sent to the recipient from the funds held in Bank USA’s Nostro account.
What happens if Bank USA doesn’t have a relationship with Bank India though? So customers don’t have to go elsewhere and so that Banks don’t have to have endless amounts of Nostro and Vostro accounts the SWIFT system can route the payment instructions through several banks.
If a customer wants to send money from Bank USA to Bank Cambodia but the two banks don’t have a pre-existing relationship or Nostro/Vostro accounts with each other but Bank India has, the payment can go from Bank USA to Bank India then to Bank Cambodia. The actual process can mean that the customer's payment goes through several banks and each one it goes to increases the time and the cost of the transfer.
Ripples technology was designed to solve all of those problems and very quickly Ripple began onboarding financial institutions in Japan and South Korea. Ripple was going mainstream and big financial heavyweights were becoming interested in the technology, Co-Founder Chris Larsen briefly became one of the world’s richest men.
Then came the FUD. Ripple was not selling XRP tokens to these financial companies, in fact, none of them at the time were using XRP at all. Instead, they were using Ripples API products xVia and xCurrent. These API's meant that companies and banks could send payment instructions to each other much faster than is possible via SWIFT using the RippleNet. The banks still needed the Nostro accounts to make payments but it meant that transactions could be achieved in minutes or less.
This, of course, caused huge concerns for XRP holders. If the banks were using the technology but without the tokens then where was the utility and value to the investors in XRP? There was also massive concerns over the centralized nature of Ripples servers and that they had premined the token supply and were holding billions of them in escrow.
It’s taken almost a year but Ripple has addressed those issues and made huge strides forward in the adoption of not only their RippleNet technology but in the adoption of XRP. So let's take a look at the top 8 reasons that Ripple is going to Moon.
- Ripple’s transactions speed can exceed that of Visa with Ripple claiming that RippleNet can process 50,000 transactions per second. Double that of Visa. At the moment the network is processing only 1500 transactions per second but the company have confirmed that the network can scale to 50,000 transactions per second if that would ever be required. To put it into context, however, Visa doesn’t actually process 25,000 transactions per second either. On average Visa handles 1667 transactions per second which means that Ripple is all ready able to compete. Ripple beats Paypal, Bitcoin and Ethereum.
- Ripple Cobalt is coming. Despite ex-employee Ethan MacBrough reporting that Ripple’s planned update Cobalt won’t be coming soon it is being developed and should eventually launch. Cobalt will reduce Ripples already fast 4 second transaction time to less than 1 second and help increase the security of the network.
- Ripple has partnered with 29 Universities in total so far as part of their Blockchain Research Program. I won’t go into loads of detail about it here because Cindy did a detailed look at it in this video below.
- Ripple partnered with Moneygram and Moneygram has been testing xRapid and RippleNet since the partnership was announced. It was confirmed that Moneygram would be using XRP tokens for liquidity.
- Ripple has been in talks with the Trump white house to discuss XRP and Blockchain technology and it was widely reported that the administration was supportive of Ripple and XRP, seeing it as a possible counter to China’s dominance of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
- Over 200 financial institutions have signed up to use Ripple products since launch. With 13 so far this year. RippleNet operates in over 40 countries across 6 Continents and the regulation team at Ripple are constantly working to add more countries to that list.
- XRP is more decentralized than Bitcoin or Ethereum! I’m sure people will comment below telling me I’m wrong and that Ripple holding 60% of the tokens makes it centralized but that would be technically incorrect. There are so many thousands of claims that XRP is centralized but they are all completely wrong. At least wrong since May 2017.
In my previous video covering China’s monopoly of Bitcoin mining, you can watch via the link above, we talked about how China has the vast majority of hashing power and while it's not the same as validating nodes they could manipulate the blockchain if they were to control the mining farms in their country. Bitcoin’s validating nodes are mainly found in the USA and are operated by big companies such as Amazon.
Ripple doesn’t require proof of work consensus and has 1047 nodes of which 150 are validating nodes according to xrp charts. Ripple holds only 10 of those validating nodes and as for the holding of tokens? Those are cryptographically locked and a specific amount is released from escrow each month. Any tokens that aren’t sold are put back into locked escrow.
- The number 1 top reason that Ripple is set to moon, however, is that Ripple launched the xRapid solution for RippleNet. Now users of xVia and xCurrent can utilize XRP tokens instead of having Nostro accounts with the foreign banks. A bank or company can send a payment using the xVia AP to the RippleNet where it is converted to XRP tokens on an exchange partner then sent to the target bank’s exchange partner and converted to the fiat currency of that country and sent to the recipent. The process is so streamlined and easy now that we should see further adoption of XRP tokens. In fact, Ripple announced 13 new partners so far this year and 5 of them are using XRP tokens for liquidity.
Euro Exim Bank is one of the new customers who will be using XRP tokens and xRapid to escape from using payment routing and the banking network. It’s also worth noting that Euro Exim Bank has been experimenting with xCurrent to send more than just payment instructions including trade finance instructions such as letters of credit and performance bonds.
Chief market strategist for Ripple Cory Johnson stated in an interview last year that he was seeing more and more smaller companies and banks looking to implement not just the RippleNet but xRapid andXRP tokens for handling remittance. He explained that it is more the ‘scrappy upstarts that want to steal market share by the truckload that will be drawn to the liquidity offered by XRP and xRapid. This makes a lot of sense, most of the biggest banks already have Nostro accounts and relationships established across the globe moving to XRP would free up capital but right now they don’t need to switch. If pressure grows on them from upstarts or a global financial crisis occurs that requires them to release that capital, moving to xRapid would be a very tempting proposition.
So there you have it guys I wasn’t too sure about Ripple’s value to XRP holders earlier last year but following the launch of xRapid and seeing new customers choose XRP as their liquidity option I have become convinced that Ripple and XRP will be one of the top cryptocurrency tokens moving forward. If Ripple continues to add financial customers who use XRP at the rate they have so far this year we could be looking at hundreds of businesses using xRapid and theXRP token by 2020.
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So is Ripple and XRP set to take over the financial world?
Do you agree that Ripple has made enough changes to counter the FUD? Is XRP going to return to it’s all-time high and beyond? Or do you still believe it’s a scam? If so let us know in the comments below. We really like to hear your thoughts on the stories we run so please get involved.
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Disclaimer: Cryptopig content is written by a team of blockchain passionate people. We are not registered as investment advisors. Don’t take the information in this post as investment advice and make sure you do your own research before investing. Cryptocurrencies are a very risky investment, never invest more money than you can afford to lose.