Sagar Sarbhai, head of regulatory relations for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East at Ripple, said in an interview with CNBC on Monday that the blockchain startup is expected to release its crypto-based xRapid product “in the next month or so.”
Ripple’s xRapid is a tool that is designed to give banks a much faster way to make cross-border transactions by using its XRP cryptocurrency. Sarbhai said in his interview with CNBC that he was “very confident that in the next one month or so you will see some good news coming in where we launch the product live in production.”
CNBC provides some background on how xRapid works:
Ripple says its xRapid product uses the XRP cryptocurrency as a kind of “bridge” between currencies, allowing payment providers and banks to process faster cross-border transactions.
For example, a bank might want to process a transaction from U.S. dollars to Indian rupees. According to Ripple, this process requires pre-funded local currency accounts in order to take place. With xRapid, Ripple claims that process would be sped up by converting the U.S. dollars into XRP tokens, to then move the money overseas, converting it back into Indian rupees at the other end.
While Ripple has struck deals with American Express, Western Union, MoneyGram and Santander, “those partnerships have so far either been unrelated to XRP or are strictly xRapid trial runs,” according to CNBC. In other words, there aren’t any banks that are actually using XRP yet.
Nonetheless, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse (pictured) told CNBC in June that he expects that to change by the end of next year.
“I’ve publicly stated that by the end of this year I have every confidence that major banks will use XRapid as a liquidity tool,” Garlinghouse told CNBC in an interview at the Money 20/20 Europe fintech conference in Amsterdam, Netherland, that aired on TV on Tuesday.
“You know, by the end of next year, I would certainly hope that we would see you know in the order of… dozens.”
Ripple says on its website that it can complete a cross-border transaction in 4 seconds, compared to over 2 minutes for Ethereum and more than an hour for Bitcoin. A traditional banking system takes three-to-five days to complete this transaction, according to Ripple.
Photo: Ripple