Ripple on Wednesday posted 9% gains soon after Swift announced a partnership with R3, a blockchain consortium.

At 0800 UTC, the XRP/USD was trading at 0.2934 on Binance. As the market sentiment kicked in, the pair posted three consecutive hourly sessions in green, taking the value to as high as 0.3292. By 1300 UTC, Ripple had risen to 12.2%. In comparison, Bitcoin surged at a modest 1.29%, and Ethereum gained 2.65% against the US Dollar.

Swift Brings the Bulls

Brussel-based global banking giant Swift today announced that it would integrate R3’s trade finance platform with its own Global Payments Innovation solution (GPI). Speaking at the Paris Fintech Forum, CEO Gottfried Leibbrandt clarified that the platforms would merely explore potential interconnectivity between their cross border payment solutions.

“We are announcing later today a proof-of-concept with the R3 blockchain on [a] trade where you can initiate a payment on the [trading] platform, and then it goes into GPI,” Leibbrandt told CNBC.

Earlier, R3 had integrated Ripple Labs’s XRP token as an asset for their Corda platform. The organizations also partnered with global banking giants such as Barclays and Royal Bank of Canada to test XRP for cross border payments. However, in September 2017, R3 had dragged Ripple Labs into a legal dispute for violating a purchase agreement of 5 billion XRP tokens. They later resolved the matter, and XRP became the first integrated cryptocurrency of R3’s open-source blockchains solution.

XRP Demand to Go Up?

Leibbrandt expressed his reservations about XRP as a global asset to a cross border payment network. The Swift executive said that banks remain hesitant to convert things into a cryptocurrency because of volatility. The biggest drawback of Ripple Labs, according to Leibbrandt, is their reliance on XRP.

Now that the cryptocurrency comes as a part of the R3 deal, Swift would likely test it for its scalability and underlying volatility. This alone has excited bulls to speculate on the potential profitability XRP promises. Nevertheless, only a full-fledged integration would validate XRP’s growing demand in the future. The involvement of Swift, for starters, could allow bulls to establish a strong floor for pricing.

Matt Greenspan, a senior market analyst with eToro, a UK-based investment brokerage, earlier expressed his bullishness about XRP, saying it is a “unique digital asset.” In the same breath, the analyst also noted that with Ripple Labs holding a majority of tokens, banks and investors would find it difficult to trust the project.

“And when they knock on the door of a bank, the bank says tell us about it. They’re going to say, ‘Why are you holding onto a majority?’ That will be a reservation,” said Greenspan.

The XRP/USD rate at the time of this writing was 0.3238.

Click here for a real-time XRP price chart.

Featured Image from Shutterstock. Price Charts from TradingView.