Ripple’s CEO has recently made headlines by stating that he foresees that a multitude of large, established banks will utilize the firm’s XRP coin by the end of the year. Adoption by financial institutions to the degree proposed by Ripple’s CEO would constitute a major step forwards for cryptocurrencies in general and XRP in particular.

These comments from the CEO of the San Francisco-based startup, Brad Garlinghouse, came during the Money 20/20 Conference in Amsterdam earlier this week. He went on to note that Ripple is already talking with several different financial actors, and both Western Union and Moneygram have reportedly started testing of Ripple’s solution. The banks are mainly interested in xRapid, one of Ripple’s products which is mainly aimed at financial organizations conducting business in developing economies and emerging markets. The xRapid product gives users the ability to near-instantly convert fiat currencies into XRP, which is helpful as many emerging markets require the use of pre-funded local currency accounts.

This comes as the international payment provider and foreign exchange broker Currencies Direct last month announced the world’s first successfully completed international payment using xRapid. It would seem that Currencies Direct has paved the way for xRapid adoption by more established financial service providers. Garlington noted that he had ”every confidence” that xRapid would be used as a liquidity tool by major global banks later this year. He also speculated that Ripple could see major bank adoption ”in the order of dozens” by late next year.

Currencies Direct is hedging their operations on the belief that cryptocurrencies will increasingly be used as a ”transfer of value”, rather than a store of value, and said that the use of XRP was a ”game changer” in realizing this vision. Currencies Direct’s CPO went on to note that the firm believes that a transition to cryptocurrency coins centered on being transfer vessels of value instead of storing value is the ”logical step” for the industry. One should note, however, that the industry is still far from a consensus regarding how cryptocurrencies will be used, however, it would, therefore, seem that Ripple would handle a transition to an industry focused on ”transfer of value” quite well. Major banks have previously been notoriously reluctant to adopt cryptocurrency technologies, however, it would seem that Garlington believes that this could very well change through the deployment of xRapid.

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