Ripple and Its Role in E-Commerce

If you will look at the price of cryptocurrencies recently, all the top coins are bleeding red. Bitcoin has dropped below $4,500 while other altcoins are bearish as well. However, Ripple was able to minimize the drop mainly because of xRapid. Ripple has been able to establish relationships with different institutions prior to the Bitcoin Cash hard fork.

Role in E-Commerce?

For former eBay chief product officer RJ Pittman, he says that xRapid and XRP both play a major role in the growth of e-commerce worldwide. During the Swell 2018 conference that was held in San Francisco, Pittman mentioned that only 10% to 20% of all transactions in the US are online. He said that “We talk about the importance of payments in the future. We are nowhere close to hitting critical mass. Do we have the payment infrastructure? Do we have scalability? Do we have the cost models in place? Because it’s going to get bitterly competitive when everything—every single transaction, every type—is being done digitally”.

Now, Pittman thinks that Ripple products such as xRapid and xCurrent can transform how we transact, particularly cross-border payments.

Pittman mentioned that “The buyer wants to know: Did the seller ship the goods? The seller wants to know: Did the buyer pay? Where’s the money? Who’s holding it? and you sort of have PayPal in the middle in most countries, but not in all. And it’s sort of this mysterious guessing game. And it was one of the biggest call drivers in the contact center. We had thousands of people in the contact center answering the mystery questions of where’s my goods and where’s the payment. And even when the buyer did pay, by the way, it didn’t necessarily mean that the seller had the money and it was settled. There was a whole other level of mystery of exactly when was this going to happen”.

Lower the Cost of Cross-Border Transactions

For Cory Johnson, Ripple has been able to lower the cost of cross-border transactions which is why it is being used by institutions. He mentioned that “Many of them are using XRP to do transactions across borders to lower their cost from 40 basis points to 4 basis points and from 4 days to 2 minutes. That can only be done using these digital assets or cryptocurrencies”.

Ripple has been dubbed as Bitcoin 2.0. Johnson even mentioned that Bitcoin made use of “poor technology”. Now, Ripple has partnered with some well-established names in business, from Western Union to Santander. It has also been rumored that Ripple could be partnering with Bank of America.

But there are a number of challenges that Ripple team had to deal with. For instance, Western Union thought that Ripple’s products didn’t actually help in lessening the cost of cross-border transactions. However, in defense of Ripple, they released a statement saying that the sample was too small to have that conclusion regarding the Ripple product.

In addition to this, there were also lawsuits that claim XRP of being a security. Recently, Ripple’s legal team was able to transfer the case to a federal court thinking that they have a stronger chance of winning.