Ripple has announced its acquisition of Iceland-based crypto trading firm Algrim, with the goal to further expand its presence in Europe and help provide better service to customers.

Ripple extends European reach

The new acquisition and expansion in Iceland will help advance Ripple’s global reach, as well as bring in strategic partners and financial institutions to RippleNet.

Currently, the crypto firm has over 200 customers signed on to RippleNet with over a dozen customers leveraging XRP in cross-border transactions.

In addition to Iceland, Ripple has offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Mumbai, Singapore, São Paulo, and Sydney.

According to the official announcement, the acquisition brings six new engineers to Ripple’s ranks, who will focus on integrations with partner crypto exchanges.

Ripple continues its acquisition streak, and launches operations in Iceland. Welcome to the family, Algrim! https://t.co/suIyB4PVs4 — Ripple (@Ripple) September 30, 2019

The new team will also focus on the ongoing development of Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) product which utilizes XRP for production cross-border payments.

The ODL payment service allows companies to transfer funds from one currency to XRP and from XRP to another currency. As such, companies are able to avoid opening a bank account in countries they want to send payments to.

According to the company, more than a dozen customers are using XRP for cross-border transactions.

Christopher Kanaan, SVP of Engineering, stated that the team addition will be pivotal in continuing the development of their ODL.

“We’ve been committed to sourcing expert crypto and trading talent in key global markets since day one, and the acquisition of the Algrim engineering team is a successful example of doing just that.”

The former Algrim team will include seasoned industry executive Dadi Armannsson and bring to Ripple more than a decade’s worth of experience building trading platforms.

Ripple expanding team through acquisitions

Over the last two years, Algrim has spent time to develop its crypto trading platform integrating more than 30 markets.

Prior to this, the team spent over a decade building traditional trading platforms and foreign exchange trading algorithms.

Algrim CEO Dadi Armannsson has affirmed in a statement that joining Ripple was natural as both firms share a vision to facilitate the widespread adoption of blockchain technology and digital assets.

“We are big believers in XRP and the XRP Ledger, and eager to help build the future of payments at Ripple,” he further added.

Both team acquisitions point to Ripple’s strong market momentum and focus on attracting and developing the best in engineering talent.

The news follows Ripple’s announcement on Friday of its acquisition of Logos Network, an incubator that invests in businesses building in the XRP ecosystem, adding eight new engineers to the Xpring team who will focus on exploring and building XRP-related decentralized finance (DeFi) products.

This acquisition streak displays Ripple’s strong market momentum and focus on attracting and developing the best in engineering talent.

XRP prime for price spike

Coincidentally or not, the XRP price has seen some mild positive movements in recent weeks, against both the USD and BTC, though at the time of writing, prices have fallen by a little more than three percent over the past 24 hours.

Despite the drop, many are speculating on a price spike for XRP during the next month due to the fact that Swell will be taking place in October.

$XRP moving higher, continuing to form rounded bottom. This is more than a technical story. The SWELL narrative should be a positive force for the next ~30 days. My favorite major alt chart for October: pic.twitter.com/bVB8998ASj — Luke Martin (@VentureCoinist) October 1, 2019

Ripple Labs will host Swell, the annual conference where the “world’s most trusted voices across financial services, payments, technology, and policy” gather to discuss the future of the payments industry and highlight their native XRP token.

In the past, the conference has led to strong rallies for the XRP price and with the event on the horizon once again, cryptocurrency analysts are lined up to take advantage of a possible price swell.