f-ledger

Can users of the service purchase digital assets or is it strictly custodial in nature? Also, the use of Ripple’s logo instead of XRP’s strikes me as intentional.

I am in banking and can tell you that compliance departments at large banks are HUGE despite being a cost center. It’s just the cost of doing business in today’s regulatory environment. Of course, as we continue down the path of deregulation, and as technology (i.e. AI) continues to automate many traditional compliance processes, banks in the US are scaling back the armies of compliance personnel that were assembled in the post-Dodd Frank era.

Good read @Hodor! I completely agree that the market prices are not reflective of everything going on behind the scenes across this whole space right now.

Thanks! That was exactly what I was hoping to not be the case. Why would I hold some new stable coin to earn a lower ROI than many other investments out there...though I applaud them for providing an alternative to Tether.

Isn’t the whole point of xRapid interoperability? Why couldn’t settlement process of a SWIFT payment be handled via Ripple? I suppose it would just require the functionality on SWIFT’s end to talk to the XRP ledger...

Are we sure that Uphold intends to pay interest on XRP deposits? Or will they pay interest for you to hold their USD backed stable coin? Also, the inactive account deactivation thing is a major concern.

I heard that an employee asked WF’s CEO* (edit) about Ripple during that event a couple months back and he hadn’t heard of it... can you confirm?

Meh. It’s a cold, cold world out there. And banks are only loyal to one thing: $

^This. R3 still has an impressive roster of global FI’s but has all but run out of gas. Ripple has the war chest, an impressive roster of FI clients in its own right, and the technology that R3 set out to develop but never delivered. It makes perfect sense.

It's all fun and games until someone builds a p2p app that's basically xRapid (edit: powered by the XRP ledger, of course) that allows the entire world to bypass banks. Hmm... maybe Xpring could fund such a project

It’s worth noting that at Ant Financial’s launch event they publicly trialed the first payment in front of a crowd - something that Ripple has done recently in NYC and on the Ellen Show. Seems like Ripple’s handiwork to me...

Awesome post. So much to be excited about right now despite all the onslaught of FUD plaguing the market.

The calm before the storm. No need to build hype among the general public when the goal is to build hype among the upper echelon of the global financial services world. They’re handling their business quietly behind closed doors, the results of which we will see in the years to come.

Is anyone familiar with WU’s model and the flow behind their cross border payments? Are they even moving money the sender’s funds from Point A to Point B with each individual transaction like SWIFT? Or is their model to keep enough local currency on hand to fund the payment to the recipient at Point B in local currency? If it’s the latter, then I would imagine the WU system is simply a bilateral messaging service that potentially already occurs in near real time without incurring the sorts of time inefficiencies and clearing and settlement costs that banks and other payment providers experience in their business model(s) in which the sender’s funds must pass through corespondent banking channels before finally reaching the destination country To that end, it would make sense if their current model doesn’t reap the same advantages as other international payment providers and FIs, which could explain the lack of enthusiasm. Also, the “Internet of Value” and the eventual ability for consumers to send funds from their XRP wallet to anyone in the world with a Ripple wallet, or to an unaffiliated FI or payment provider could be viewed as a threat to their existence, hence the dismissiveness of Ripple by the CEO. Still, WU must move high value payments cross-border to fund their accounts around the world, which could ostensibly save them money in the clearing and settlement of these larger cross-border payments, but not the individual transaction level payments. This could explain why the measly 10 transactions didn’t amount to game changing savings and transaction speed that xRapid is able to achieve for others in the space, while also posing a threat to WU if both the sender and receiver wouldn’t be required to utilize WU’s services. In conclusion (and this is pure speculation), it’s highly possible that WU doesn’t need Ripple/XRP for their legacy model, and perhaps views Ripple as a potential disruption to their market share. The IOV will hopefully, eventually democratize cross-border Payments for P2P, B2B, and B2C, as companies outside of Ripple begin to roll out more decentralized models featuring extremely low transaction costs (passed on to the transacting as fees), rendering WU obsolete in the future global financial services landscape. This would explain their blatant attempt to undermine Ripple’s technology. I don’t view the CEO’s statements as reflecting negatively on Ripple’s technology, but more a reflection of WU’s longstanding business model and fear that universal adoption could ultimately lead to their own demise. Note: much of the above is purely hypothetical though, so if anyone has additional insight into how their payment flows work and may be the outlier in the space, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

I agree, it seems fishy for him to make any conclusory statements after only 10 transactions. And why or how only 10 transactions...? That's supposed to be less than a minute of testing using xRapid at 4 seconds a piece.