от batbaiqn » 21 Сеп 2018, 08:01
Coming to a (Virtual) Shelf Near you: Everything you Need to Know About xRapid, Ripple's new Crypto Service Product:
So What Is xRapid?
xRapid is the latest product to come from Ripple, and intends to make those same transactions even faster than under xCurrent, while making them even cheaper. More importantly, it takes advantage of XRP in order to settle the money transfer.
How exactly can XRP be put to use here? Well, it's used as a ‘Bridge currency' in order to streamline the process.
Here's an example of how it operates.
If person A in the UK wanted to send some money to Person B in India, let's say £1,000. Through the use of xRapid, Person A would be able to transfer this money by converting it to XRP, and is then sent across to Person B within seconds, then being converted into the native currency, Rupees. The fees are almost zero and the whole process takes four seconds.
Had Person B gone ahead and used the traditional bank system, it would take days and cost him a large fee
xRapid Spells The End Of Nostro Accounts
This example from above is one of the quick descriptions that we can give on how exactly how xRapid works, but there's a whole other reason for why it'll prove so powerful.
In order to have an effective and stable bank, it needs a good level of liquidity, or a high quantity . of available money, in order to make a successful foreign exchange. So why dose this impact on cross-border payments? Because the current system of exchange is incredibly inefficient.
If we are to head back to the previous scenario of sending a payment from the UK to India. Let's say that Person A decided to use the traditional system instead, the first person's bank would need a ‘Nostro Account' in operation in India. The nostro account is pre-funded with millions worth of a local currency, hence the liquidity.
The money is then exchanged from one type of currency to the new one through this pre-funded account, and then across to Person B's account in India.
Traditionally, banks have these sorts of pre-funded, local nostro accounts for any kind of currency, all in order to facilitate the various cross-border payments. And while it's done to a high volume, it's an expensive and incredibly inefficient system.
If these banks were to switch the local nostro accounts, and replace them with a digital cryptocurrency, it'll completely remove any need for specific bank accounts full of foreign currencies all around the world. As a result, xRapid will make for a far faster, cheaper and more efficient cross-border payment system.
So With Such A Good System, Are Banks Actually Using It?
Well, at the moment they're not, but that may be a matter of when, not if.
The vast majority of companies that Ripple has a partnership with are currently on xCurrent, but Ripple is making an explicit effort to nudge its partners towards putting xRapid to use. Currently, it's a strategy that's working, with a number of its partners beginning testing the xRapid product and have already seen a reported 40-70% in savings.
The . CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse has mentioned that “dozens of banks” will be using xRapid by the end of 2019.
While that makes for an optimistic view for Ripple, it's no easy task to get so many major banks and financial institutions to switch, as Ripple's Sagar Sarbhai explains:
“a couple of years ago the narrative was: blockchain good, crypto bad,” It's only been a recent development where banks have become more receptive of the idea of using blockchain, and they remain wary of cryptocurrency payments still.
Sarbhai says that’s beginning to change.
“I think that narrative thankfully is now changing because policymakers, regulators are seeing that there is a strong benefit that digital assets, cryptocurrencies bring in.”
xRapid Expected To Go Live In The ‘Next Month Or so'
This is the sort of thing that investors in XRP have been really waiting for. xRapid is being hailed as Ripple's silver bullet because it makes use of the XRP token in order to settle payments efficiently. If banks do adopt xRapid, the volume (and
price) of XRP is like
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Interestingly, there has been a lot of movement in exchange wallets on the XRP Ledger for transfers above 10 million XRP. This movement observed a sharp spike that correlates with the rise in the price of XRP. It is worth noting that these wallets also engaged in the accumulation of XRP prior to big movement.
Wallet Movement
XRP II, Ripple’s registered Money Service Business [MSB] for selling XRP to financial institutions, also features in some of these transactions. Most of the volume is also coming from Japanese exchanges such as Coincheck, Bitbank, and Coinone. Also notable is Binance’s transfer of 52 million XRP to another wallet in their possession.
The combined trading volume of these trades is 295 million over just two days. Whereas big transfers do occur on a constant basis on the XRP Ledger, a concentrated and constant movement is rarely observed. This comes up to around $100 million if the price of XRP is only $0.35, 7 cents below its current trading price.
This might be indicative of test runs for xRapid. While Ripple themselves have not revealed any news, the transparency of the XRP Ledger reveals more about xRapid than they would want to