Although the crypto market is facing a huge meltdown, Ripple Technologies seems to be undeterred and going strong with its plans ahead. In a fresh new announcement, Spanish banking giant Banco Santander has announced to launch a new mobile app which will be powered by Ripple’s (XRP) distributed ledger technology.
This will make the Spanish banking group Banco Santander—“the first UK bank to introduce Blockchain technology which facilitates international payments, through a new app.” The bank plans to make this service available in Q1 of 2018. The bank told analysts that “We expect to be one of the first global banks to roll out distributed ledger technology based payments for individuals.”
As per the plans, customers will be able to make cross-border-payments on the very same day and just under a minute from the time of processing the transaction. In addition to this, the mobile app will allow for person-to-person payments and will also provide a digital wallet along with a personal finance manager.
As reported by Finextra, “Santander has been piloting the technology for 18 months with bank staffers. The app has been tested with Apple Pay for payments of between £10 and £10,000 using Touch ID for secure sign-in.” A Santander spokesperson said: “we plan to launch this in the next few months, and we can confirm on the record that we plan to use xCurrent in the project.” A strange thing is that the xCurrent project doesn’t make use of Ripple’s own native XRP tokens for transactions.
Santander is said to be heavily invested in Ripple and claims that the use of the cryptocurrency helps to make their banking solution quite convenient and simple for customers. The banks said: “The need for finance has evolved from providing a physical Pound in your pocket or card in your purse, where you pay at a till, to being seamlessly integrated into a new, always on, connected lifestyle. At Santander we work hard to ensure our banking is simple, personal and fair and believe new Blockchain technology will play a transformational role in the way we achieve our goals and better serve our customers, adding value by creating more choice and convenience.”
Ripple charted its path to glory and an unprecedented bull run in the mid-December 2017 since the Japanese and South Korean started to test Ripple technology at their end. Ripple’s price was soaring new highs till the first week of 2018 following which news of several regulatory proposals from South Korea caused the overall crypto markets to correct majorly and Ripple too, has been a part of the meltdown.
However, all this has not deterred the blockchain startup to deepen its roots further in the crypto space. Ripple Technologies is making some important partnerships with several payment services and other financial institutions. Last month in Jan 2018, one of the world’s biggest money transfer company MoneyGram announced its ties with Ripple for testing the latter’s xRapid solution which provides on-demand liquidity for instant money transfer. Later, during the end of Jan, IDT Corporation and Mercury FX followed the suite.
Ripple also has been a victim of the falling markets and at the press time, it is currently trading at a price of $0.80, according to CoinMarketCap. Ripple’s existing market cap stands at $31 billion.
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