In a frankly colossal announcement yesterday, Apple have announced a new update that seems to support Ripple’s Inter-Ledger Protocol (ILP). This is a network through which cryptocurrency and blockchain payments can be facilitated. At the moment, Ripples ILP allows a multitude of currencies to pass through the network however, in order to bolster the movement of Ripples XRP currency, the ILP provides a much faster service to payments and transfers in XRP. Farhan Hussain provides an interesting demonstration of how the Ripple ILP works in practice and also discusses the topic at hand, you can see Hussain’s video, here- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBRRWHoeL-0 So, the update from Apple seems to be being rolled out via Safari browsers using both macOS 11.1 and iOS 11.1 (for iMac and iPhone models respectively). This suggests that Apple will be accepting cryptocurrency payments in the future for services on the app store. Moreover, though and most interestingly, we need to consider how Apples current payment service, Apple Pay might be integrated into this. Apple pay provides near-field communication (NFC) payment services to their phones, through ‘contactless payments’. In the same way new bank cards operate (plus a whole host of additional security measures) many Apple phones can be used to authorise payments in shops, bars, cafes and generally anywhere with a card payment facility that accepts contactless payments. Through integration with Ripples ILP, Apple Pay could be used for the contactless transfer of cryptocurrencies by using NFC technologies. Because Ripples ILP does not just support Ripple, this means that eventually, many different currencies could be supported by Apples payment infrastructure. We should also consider that since it is Ripples ILP that seems to be the chosen path here, we can expect that sooner, rather than later, Ripple XRP will become integrated in Apples systems, most probably before many other payment options. This is yet another huge step forward for Ripple that has been announced in the past few days. We did say that April would be a big month for the Ripple community. Seemingly, it is starting to look like Ripples worldwide domination plan is really taking hold. With Apple, almost on board and rumours from Santander surfacing today, the picture for Ripples future is becoming very clear indeed. We don’t expect Ripples value to start bouncing up as a result of this, the markets are still looking a bit sorry this morning and as these announcements are mostly expected, they aren’t causing a huge amount of turbulence in terms of Ripples numbers, but even so, all of this news is good news, very good news indeed.