In 2019, circulation and widespread adoption are still the greatest challenges faced by cryptocurrencies. Imagine if all digital currency traders were able to readily use their funds to settle retail transactions; such a situation would not only inject considerable liquidity into the markets but also bring about a much-needed sense of everyday functionality and legitimacy. For many core development teams, pushing circulation is not part of their plans because they have high hopes that cryptocurrency adoption will happen organically, but this is not what Ripple Labs, developers of the XRP token, believe in.
According to CoinMarketCap, Ripple is the third most valuable cryptocurrency in the world thanks to a $13,254,022,220 market capitalization, second only to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Currently priced at just $0.31, XRP is an interesting cryptocurrency in the sense that it is centralized and managed by a business team. With 42,832,704,971 XRP tokens in circulation, Ripple Labs executives have been considerably successful in trying to push adoption, particularly as a viable alternative to established wire transfer and money remittance systems, but the company wants to take XRP beyond this segment.
New Tools for Ripple Transactions
XRPTipBot is a new Ripple Labs project that aims to promote the circulation of XRP tokens on various social media platforms, and the company is taking the serious step of acquiring a retail banking license for the purpose of adhering to "know your customer" and anti-money laundering compliance practices. For the time being, XRPTipBot will allow users of Twitter, Reddit, Gmail, and Outlook to easily send each other XRP tokens; while this is not something that would require a banking license, Ripple Labs executives are thinking about the future in case they need to expand and scale the network.
It should be noted that XRPTipBot is already live on Reddit, a social network that has already adopted Dogecoin as its favorite token for tipping. On Reddit, XRPTipBot works in a manner similar to Dogecoin; users can tip others through the commenting system, and they can also do it through SMS. Ripple Labs has extended XRPTipBot to Discord and Twitter; expanding to more popular social networks such as Facebook may prove more difficult because those platforms are already working on developing their own cryptocurrency applications and tokens.