Ripple plans to launch cryptocurrency product for next month

The Startup blockchain of Ripple is considering launching a commercial application for a new product in its catalog focused on cryptocurrencies next month.

Sagar Sarbhai, head of regulatory relations for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East at Ripple, said Monday that the company was making significant progress with its xRapid product, which aims to help banks accelerate transactions through the use of XRP cryptocurrencies.

"I am very confident that next month we will see good news when we launch the product live," Sarbhai said of xRapid in an interview with Arjun Kharpal of CNBC.

Ripple says that its xRapid product uses XRP cryptocurrency as a kind of "bridge" between currencies, which allows payment providers and banks to process faster cross-border transactions.

For example, a bank might want to process a transaction from US dollars to Indian rupees. According to Ripple, this process requires pre-financed local currency accounts to be carried out. With xRapid, Ripple says the process will accelerate by converting US dollars. UU in XRP tokens, to then move the money abroad, converting it again into Indian rupees at the other end.

The company has reached agreements with several high-profile financial institutions, such as Santander and American Express. But those associations have so far focused mainly on another product called xCurrent.

So far, Ripple has not announced any bank that tests or uses xRapid and said earlier that banks will not be the first to try the product focused on cryptocurrencies. The companies that have tested the product include the money transfer giants Western Union and MoneyGram and the payment providers of MercuryFX, Viamericas and Cuallix.

Sarbhai said that more than 120 banks and financial institutions are currently associated with Ripple, using its product based on xCurrent.

Blockchain is commonly defined as a decentralized database to record transactions, such as an accounting book, only shared in several locations and without a central authority that supervises it.

Banks use xCurrent from Ripple to settle international transactions. The company says that banks use the platform, based on distributed accounting technology, to communicate with each other, confirming each stage of a cross-border payment in real time.

Earlier this year, Ripple Chief Executive Brad Garlinghouse said the start-up would have "dozens" of banks that would use xRapid by the end of 2019.

The authorities so far have had a cautious view on cryptocurrencies, out of concern that they could be used for illicit practices such as money laundering or investor scams. Another concern is the volatility associated with cryptocurrencies, which, without excluding the XRP, soared to unprecedented levels at the end of last year, to recede significantly this year.

Sarbhai said the regulatory environment for blockchain and cryptocurrency technology was improving, and financial watchdogs began to see the benefits of cryptography.

"A couple of years ago, the narrative was: good blockchain, bad crypto," he told CNBC. "What we are seeing now is that there are more and more regulators, who make the decisions take all the space in a single conjunction," he said.

"So, fortunately, I think the narrative is changing because legislators and regulators are seeing digital assets as a great benefit, cryptocurrencies."

The price of XRP increased to more than 3 USD per token last year, a big jump from the 0.006 USD with which it started in 2017. Having significantly retreated since then, the cryptocurrency is worth around 32 cents at the time of writing, according to the CoinMarketCap indexes.

Even at that price, the token still has a market capitalization, calculated by multiplying the price by the number of coins in circulation, of 11,200 million dollars, which makes it the third most valuable digital asset behind Ether and Bitcoin.

Ripple was founded in 2012 and holds around 60 billion of the 100 billion XRP tokens in circulation.