Ripple’s network grows and thrives: More than 200 partners count the RippleNet
Despite a continuing bear market and stagnating prices, the crypto market and blockchain technology continue to develop rapidly. Ripple revealed at the Global Islamic Economic Summit 2018 conference that cooperations are growing worldwide and that a bank in every country of the world will soon use Ripple’s technologies.
Dilip Rao, head of infrastructure innovation at Ripple, said at the conference that nearly 200 banks and financial institutions worldwide have joined RippleNet and are using and piloting the company’s software solutions:
We have so far admitted almost 200 financial institutions around the world, many of them from this part of the world.
We now have three banks in Saudi Arabia, two in Kuwait, one in Bahrain, one in Oman, a couple in the United Arab Emirates here. And it really is our fastest growing market.
For this reason, Ripple will open an office in Dubai at the end of 2018 to increase its local presence and provide direct support to all participants. He sees the application possibilities of Ripple’s Blockchain technology especially in areas where the use of traditional payment platforms like Swift would reach its limits (freely translated):
In some parts of the world, for example in South Asia, banks have abandoned the use of Swift and developed their own proprietary technologies to intervene in these corridors so that they can move money quickly and cheaply to meet the needs of customers in this high area volume corridors.
In particular, if you want to send this money, you don’t know how high the fees will be that will be charged by the bank at the other end. Therefore, you may receive much less than what you sent. And if you send money for workers, this can often be a small amount of 200 USD, and the fees for this kind of small payments can be 5 to 10%. So this hurts the people who can least afford it.
Ripple is particularly, but not only, suitable for moving small amounts of money across borders at low cost and high speed. Another sector in which Ripple could possibly be used is payment between machines, but it keeps relatively low on this statement (freely translated):
We therefore believe that the key question is quite simple: “How do we move even smaller amounts of money? ““
And that can form the basis for a digital economy. If you now think that machines talk to each other, you make about 50 billion transactions every year. This is the amount of micropayments – a tenth of a cent – and in fact the existing infrastructure cannot handle this very low transaction volume of low value. We believe that the development of new infrastructures is needed to support this type of digital economy.
Dao leaves open for the time being when and where Ripple can be used as a payment network between machines or where it is already being used. We will probably hear and see more innovations in this sector in the future. The complete lecture can be viewed here:
