With so much happening around Ripple, its enthusiasts cannot wait for Ripple’s SWELL 2019. The 2018 SWELL event had its keynote speech delivered by none other than the charismatic 42nd commander-in-chief of the United States.
Bill Clinton, in a not so crypto evangelist manner, waxed lyrical about the virtues of blockchain. He, alongside Gene Sperling, his former economic advisor delved into the growth of blockchain technology and crypto, with Clinton calling for sobriety in the area of regulation.
However, the SWELL 2019 shindig has a fantastic host of speakers lined up including the CFO Cuallix, Nicolas Palacios and Kanchan Kumar the Remitr CEO. InstraReM’s Co-Founder and CEO Prajit Nanu will be present alongside his peer Daumantas Dvilinskas, the TransferGo CEO. The event will be held in early October 2019, and Ripple is expected to once again go all out for payments, blockchain, and digital asset adoption.
Ahead of SWELL, XRP Landscape is Remarkable
The faster and affordable payments through blockchain champion has been winning in the remittance’s arena. Ripple has now collaborated with MoneyGram, purchasing a $50million worth stake in the money transfer giant.
Ripple will purchase MoneyGram’s shares at $4.10 for its first $30 million investments. MoneyGram has the option of selling Ripple another $20 million worth of shares at an equal price. MoneyGram, in turn, is adopting xRapid and will, therefore, use XRP for its operations.
Then there is Western Union change of tune. Western Union began experimenting with the Ripple platform in early 2018. However, a few months later, Hikmet Ersek the Western Union CEO made assertions that the trials they were doing with xRapid had failed. He shocked the crypto verse by hinting that the Ripple payments solution was not for Western Union.
He, however, cautioned that the test results carried were too small to act as the final evidence of the failure. Come the Brainstorm Finance 2019 conference, and Hikmet Ersek tune had changed. He was now all bullish for Ripple saying “Look, hey, I’m open, any cost savings, any innovation. I’m there. We can sign a deal tomorrow“, in an interview touching on the Western Union–xRapid pilot.
Ripple in Asia
South Korea’s leading crypto exchange CoinOne has joined SBI–Ripple Asia to enjoy their cross-border remittance solutions. CoinOne, is now on RippleNet and is working on the implementation of Ripple’s xCurrent solution too. Ripple’s payment solutions are very popular with the Asian financial institutions and have partners from China, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines.
Additional Ripple success that will make Ripple’s SWELL 2019 highly significant includes the introduction of xrpl.org. The new website hosts the tutorials, developer tools, technical documentation, and network metrics for the XRP Ledger. The website, Ripple says is “openly built and maintained by the community”, not just by one institution.
While Ripple will still play a significant role in managing and providing content for xrpl.org, so will the many other dedicated developers, designers, writers, and business leaders that interact with the XRP Ledger every day. Ripple had in February 2019, released the XRP Ledger version 1.2.0 which is more censorship resistant amongst other improvements.
Likewise, Kava Labs has launched the Kava Blockchain intending to bring Decentralized Finance to those without access to it. The blockchain is kicking off its functions with XRP support for all its DeFi services.
