- SendFriend is scheduled to go live this month
- xRapid aids Ripple’s partnerships with financial institutions
- Brad Garlinghouse is looking for ways of improving Ripple’s market reliability
On June 5, SendFriend, a Ripple and xRapid partner, announced that they would go live later this month. SendFriend promises a secure and cheaper way to transfer money by integrating blockchain technology to improve money transfer.
75% cheaper transfers through xRapid
According to a Twitter announcement earlier this year, SendFriend had saved up to 75% on the USD/PHP FX corridor. Though the tweet did not mention Ripple or xRapid involvement, SendFriend partnership with Ripple was already official by then. This is a very strategic move on the ripple team’s side, seeing that the USD/PHP corridor is the fourth largest FX corridor in the world.
A while back, Ripple had announced a series of partnerships with financial institutions. Euro Exim bank being one of the major partners, who have offices in both London and St Lucia. they had stated that they are going to start using XRP for international money transfers this year.
This is a big step for banks because instead of the individual banks owning foreign currencies, they can now buy XRP in dollars or euros, and the local market can then exchange the XRP into the local currency. Thanks to Ripple’s blockchain technology creating immutable ledgers, the process will be faster and more secure. The Exim bank will not hold any XRP. Instead, it relies on bitpay for the cryptocurrency transactions which is scheduled to be changed later.
Ripple creating the bridge
Crypto is still young. The manipulation of numbers and the unregulated state of the market allowing for many shady practices are just a few of the issues in crypto. Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, stated that they are looking for ways to increase its reliability in the market and combat such issues with the hope of increasing transparency in their project.