On Friday (February 1), cryptocurrency payment processor CoinGate announced that it had added support for XRP payments.

Lithuanian company “Virtualios Valiutos” (trading as “CoinGate”) was established in July 2014 by Dmitrijus Borisenka, Jonas Gilys, and Irmantas Bačiulis, and CoinGate went live in March 2015.

Here is how CoinGate works for merchants.

Imagine a merchant wants to sell a product or service, and he/she wants to be able to allow customers to pay with crypto; let’s say the price is $10. CoinGate then calculates (by contacting various exchanges) how much the customer would need to pay in bitcoin or 50+ other cryptocurrencies (if Bitcoin is chosen, then there is the option of sending the bitcoin payment over the Lightning Network). The customer uses a crypto wallet to make the payment. The merchant will get paid by CoinGate payment (minus a 1% processing fee) in either bitcoin, euros, or dollars.

CoinGate provides four types of integration for merchants:

A “Point of Sale” (POS) mobile app (for iOS or Android) for accepting crypto payments in any retail business.

Crypto payment plugins for various e-commerce solutions (such as WooCommerce and Magento)

A Merchant Payment API, which “provides full automation for accepting Bitcoin, Litecoin and other coins, unique addresses for each order, real-time transparent exchange rates for customers, and a platform for merchants to track and manage their payment history and payouts.”

Payment Buttons (for Bitcoin or altcoins) that can be placed on the merchant’s website.

CoinGate’s blog post says that XRP support had been added due to “very popular demand by the community,” and that this means “XRP coin owners can now use it as a means of payment at more than 4,500 shops online.” It goes on to say that once merchants that use CoinGate as their crupto payment processor start receiving XRP payments, “they will have an option to instantly settle the revenue in Euros, Bitcoin, Ether, or keep the funds in XRP.”

More interestingly, the blog post also talks about the XRP network and its increasingly level of decentralization:

“Some might say that the network is not completely decentralized because at first, the significant part of servers was controlled by a single company. However, this is not really the case. In fact, there is an ongoing decentralization strategy in place for the further stages of XRP ledger development. Basically, XRP ledger will have even more 3rd party validators joining the club. For each two trusted and highly secure nodes, one node run by developers will be removed. It will further decentralize the network and scale it to better performance at the same time. In fact, to further accelerate the decentralization of the XRP network, we are now running our own XRP Ledger validator!”

Finally, CoinGate says that it also allows XRP to be purchased using one of the various supported methods, such as via debit/credit cards or bank transfer (for European Union users).

At the time of writing, according to CryptoCompare, XRP is trading $0.3080, up 1.08% in the past 24-hour period.