XRP and Ripple Benefiting From Swell’s Shortcomings?
For a while now, many have been questioning the value and purpose of XRP and the company that builds the blockchain, Ripple.
According to Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute of Economic Research, the value of XRP and Ripple is to improve on the shortcoming of the “antique SWIFT system.” (For those unaware, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, is the current system that links the world’s banks and allows for transfers to take place.)
Tucker said in an interview with Russia Today that XRP is an “extremely important technology,” before adding that the “legacy financial systems are incapable of dealing with the new age of globalization so taking crypto to kind of fill this market niche.”
Ripple itself has acknowledged that it is looking to take market share from SWIFT.
Speaking at the Swell event in Singapore earlier this year, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse was quoted as saying that SWIFT is much like a “one-way messaging system,” in that it is rather inefficient for the purpose it was built to execute:
You execute a SWIFT wire transaction and the only way you know I received it is when you send me a note saying ‘hey, I sent you a wire’… this does not need to happen in a world where people can use better technology.
He continued that Ripple’s technologies are better than SWIFT, in that their technologies actually provide a two-way messaging framework that works with digital assets to make the financial process much more efficient.
And last year, speaking to Bloomberg, Garlinghouse said that his firm has been expanding because of the flaws in the SWIFT system.
Slow But Steady Progress
Sure, Ripple’s network is rather small when compared to that of SWIFT, though there is no doubt that this newcomer is starting to make some progress in terms of overtaking the legacy system that it is seeking to supplant.
Per previous reports from Ethereum World News, Ripple has just completed a massive funding round, a Series C. The investment, $200 million — sourced from global investment firm Tetragon, Japanese finance-centric conglomerate SBI, and Route 66 Ventures.
This comes hot on the heels of a number of finance companies lauding Ripple for making their business more cost-efficient and faster. For instance, David Lighton of SendFriend said that Ripple’s technologies have allowed its customers to save 80% on remittance and other payment fees.
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