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Bitcoin Global News (BGN)

March 16, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- Ripple announced Monday its plan to invest heavily in startup companies that are developing ways to use the XRP for micro-payments. Ripple hopes to someday be the cryptocurrency of choice for banks, but so far it has attracted only cross-border remittance services Western Union and MoneyGram as customers. The new investment plan is aimed at a second area of growth: increasing peer-to-peer use of the XRP. Adoption of the XRP by banks and other financial institutions will have to wait.

Ripple is a very big cryptocurrency, coming in third behind Bitcoin and Ethereum, with a market cap equivalent of 1/5 that of Bitcoin and 1/2 that of Ethereum. But Ripple is somewhat desperately seeking justification for its valuation, scrambling to find the right partners to give the XRP some meaning. So Ripple is using the windfall of its success to advance XRP use cases in the crypto ecosystem, starting with an investment $25 million in Omni, a startup that is introducing XRP as payment for its Bay Area "share economy" enabling storage and rental services.

In an interview with TechCrunch at the Money2020 Conference in Singapore, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said, “We, Ripple, will stay focused on solving that institutional use case, but we would certainly partner with companies that are looking to use XRP in lots of different ways. You should expect that you’ll see more of those (referring to the Omni investment).”

By: BGN Editorial Staff