It’s all about liquidity and making XRP accessible to all. Rain, a Bahrain based Sharia compliant cryptocurrency exchange now supports XRP, the native token of the Ripple ledger, and will trade the asset against the Bahrain Dinar, Kuwaiti Dinar, UAE Dirham, Saudi Riyal, Oman Rial and the US Dollar.
According to reports by Saudi Gazette, the crypto exchange is the first to graduate from the country’s regulator sandbox after successfully ticking all check-boxes as stipulated by Shariyah Review Bureau (SRB), a Sharia Advisory firm licensed by the Bahrain’s central bank and tasked with issuing compliance certificates.
Rain is now applying for the required operational license. As a result, Rain joins the likes of Stellar, X8, Ovamba and Beehive as firms advised by the SRB who have solid plans of expanding and having a foothold in the region. Yasser S. Dahlawi, the CEO of SRB said:
“With more than 13 years of experience in the Shariah certification and Shariah audit businesses, we are confident that we will be able to further develop the Islamic crypto and exchange business systematically and help customers like Rain open new opportunities for investors.”
Now that the SRB has determined that the exchange’s activities—sale, custody and purchase of assets—are in line with Sharia principle, Rain shall concentrate their efforts availing their assets to high-net worth institutions as Islamic hedge funds as well as super-capitalized family offices in the country. Abdullah Almoaiqel, one of the co-founders of the three-year old exchange said:
“This is a major milestone in the cryptocurrency and Islamic markets. This is the implementation of Rain’s mission to provide the Middle East with a cryptocurrency exchange that meets the highest standards in terms of regulation, accessibility, security and trust. We are excited to open the Islamic markets to cryptocurrency with a Shariah-compliant exchange and a suite of cryptocurrency investment opportunities. We could not be more excited to have graduated the sandbox and are very close to our public launch now.”
That XRP would at the end of the day be compliant with Sharia law was expected and confirms confidence espoused by Dilip Rao, who is the Global head for Infrastructure Innovation at Ripple. While speaking at the Global Islamic Economic Summit in Dubai late last year he was confident that most, if not all of Ripple Inc solutions where compatible with Sharia Laws.
“If you can, with integrity, tokenize an asset worth a million dollars, you can now have a million people share in that asset rather than necessarily one millionaire. It starts to solve for reach into the unbanked. We think therefore aligns well with all of the Islamic finance principles.”
He went on adding that XRP as a reliable digital asset can be used by several countries like UAE who plan to transition, taking government activities to the DLT by 2020. By doing so, Rao reckons that it “is a fantastic way to encourage innovation, to bring Fintechs to your market and then to then build the capability locally to iterate on those solutions that the Fintechs bring.”
