Ripple’s XRP prowess in 2018 in a nutshell: A worth Bitcoin (BTC) competitor

It is correct to say that Ripple’s XRP has been the darling of the cryptocurrency market in 2018. The asset is currently accustomed to making big headlines. That having been said, this article seeks to put together the events that have set the crypto apart from the rest in the last three months. The article is mainly written with both the crypto enthusiast and the ardent trader in mind.

One of the most significant achievements of Ripple was the launch of its xRapid blockchain transfers system. Ripple continues to work tirelessly to ensure that it brings real-world solutions especially in the world of cross-border funds transfer. An area that has been dominated by the fiat transfer system, SWIFT. The San Francisco-based blockchain company is establishing itself as a worthy competitor to SWIFT which is currently facing issues with delays and disappearing transactions. Ripple believes that it will soon overtake SWIFT due to the convenience in its systems, RippleNet and xRapid offer the financial industry.

“The technologies that banks use today that Swift developed decades ago really hasn’t evolved or kept up with the market…Swift said not that long ago they didn’t see blockchain as a solution to correspondent banking. We’ve got well over 100 of their customers saying they disagree,” Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

The xRapid went live in October 2018 and has already signed customers such as Mercury FX and Cuallix. During the launch, the firm said that the cooperative financial firm Catalyst Corporate Federal Credit Union will be starting to use the system. The launch took place during this year’s Swell conference where the senior vice president of Ripple Asheesh said while speaking to CNBC:

“I’m really excited to bring the product into the market at the time when there is a lot of skepticism about digital assets and their real use case.”

The XRP community, last week were rewarded for their efforts of convincing the CEO of Binance, Zhao Changpeng to add XRP as a base currency to the platform. Zhao engaged the community asking them to give reasons why they think XRP as a base currency will be a great addition to both the exchange and XRP. On this year’s Christmas EVE, CEO of Binance also known as CZ announced on Twitter that “we will be adding a couple of pairs with XRP as the quote currency shortly.”

Another milestone for the XRP community is the new product, Corda Settler that was added to the Corda open source enterprise product that was started in 2016. The Corda Settler has been designed to give businesses access to the blockchain technology. The company behind the Settlement product says that it has signed over 200 business enterprises spanning several industries.

“The deployment of the Corda Settler and its support for XRP as the first settlement mechanism is an important step in showing how the powerful ecosystems cultivated by two of the of the world’s most influential crypto and blockchain communities can work together.” Said Gendal Brown – CTO.

An exchange based in Canada, CoinField also announced the launch of its platform using XRP as the base currency. The exchange is accessible from 61 countries around the world. To use the exchange, the customers from all the countries must complete KYC (know your customer) following the registration process.