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- Xago’s CEO describes in an interview that XRP is better suited to handling retail payments than Bitcoin.
- MoneyGram has complained to Ripple that xRapid needs to be rolled out faster worldwide.
The most widespread cryptocurrency worldwide is still Bitcoin. Countless companies are driving the adaptation of BTC decisively forward so that Bitcoin can be used everywhere as a legitimate means of payment. Nevertheless, the fees in the Bitcoin network are comparatively high compared to other projects such as XRP.
XRP better suited for cross-border payments than Bitcoin
Jurgen Kuhnel, CEO of Xago.io, describes in an interview that he and his company love Bitcoin more than anything. However, he finds XRP much more suitable for processing payments in the retail sector than the leading cryptocurrency:
We love Bitcoin and also love what Bitcoin stands for, but for retail payments Bitcoin in its current form is not suited to the task. The purpose of our exchange is to build liquidity for XRP in the countries we will be expanding to.
Kuhnel also says that he is critical of Facebook’s digital currency, the Libra, and that a newly created currency that continues to suffer from inflation has no future in his opinion. As we reported earlier, Libra’s currency basket will consist of the USD, Euro, Japanese Yen, British Pound, Singapore Dollar and American and European government bonds.
It is an open secret that since the decoupling from the so-called gold standard in 1971, the USD has lost much of its value to this day. Kuhnel notes that XRP is more suitable in the long run because each transaction burns a fraction of the money in circulation and keeps the value of XRP constant:
Each transaction burns around 0.000012XRP and therefore supply is continually getting diminished. Because Libra is backed by assets that will continually issue more and more coins as the demand increases and effectively keeping the coin at 1 dollar so to speak.
Libra would indeed provide a global currency that can be used by many people. However, it does not solve the problem that fiat currencies are created “out of nothing” and inflation continues to progress. Kuhnel and his team are using the immediate provision of liquidity to help people in South Africa.
Xago started in South Africa on 9 October 2019 and will launch in five more African countries where people have no or very difficult access to financial services. Over 1.7 billion people worldwide still have no access to a bank account or mobile banking app. Xago wants to solve this problem, among other things.
The Xago Gateway provides an entry point to RippleNet for businesses and individuals. The gateway enables customers to trade, send and receive XRP. XRP is the native digital asset of the XRP ledger and can be exchanged within seconds and with a low transaction fee of 0.25% between XRP addresses worldwide.
MoneyGram CEO: “xRapid needs to spread faster”
MoneyGram has been piloting the use of payment solutions from Ripple for some time now. In the past, MoneyGram reported that they were very satisfied with the results. During an interview at Fintech Week 2019, Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, surprisingly announced that he had received a call from Alexander Holmes, CEO of MoneyGram, and that he was angry with Ripple.
He demanded that the on-demand liquidity payment solution, also known as xRapid, be expanded faster as its experience in Mexico is promising:
I got a call two weeks ago from the CEO of MoneyGram. And he’s mad at us because we’re not fast enough. That was an incredible [call].
He wants us to introduce on-demand liquidity, formerly [known as]xRapid [to]more markets faster because they have such good experiences with Mexico that they say, ‘We want to spread this faster and more aggressively.
Meanwhile, the Ripple Community is eagerly awaiting the Swell Conference to be held in Singapore on November 7-8, 2019.
