While the market has been focused on the bitcoin frenzy and commercial banks continue their migration onto enterprise-grade platforms, such as RippleNet, another revolution has quietly bubbled up around Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

Central banks and financial market infrastructures, key stakeholders in the global payments system, have ramped up their engagement with technology providers to explore how they can leverage DLT.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is front and center in this space, announcing the second phase of their Project UBIN at their fintech event in November 2017.

Additionally, the Australian Stock Exchange has capped off two years of experimentation to declare the adoption of DLT to replace their legacy CHESS securities clearing and settlement platform.

So what’s Ripple doing to help?

Ripple is leading the sea change in payments

At Ripple, we’re focused on engaging with commercial banks to implement production-grade enterprise systems — using DLT — to support cross-border payments. In fact, we recently celebrated a significant milestone — we added the 100th client to RippleNet. What’s more, banks like Siam Commercial in Thailand, Standard Chartered in Singapore, Axis in India and Rakbank in the UAE are already sending and receiving payments in commercial volumes. In Japan, 61 members of the Japan Bank Consortium are in pre-production stage on a hosted Ripple platform.

The Ripple xCurrent product — a solution that allows banks to settle cross-border payments with end-to-end tracking instantly — is now enterprise-tested. Also, the public XRP Ledger, operating since late 2012, successfully completed 35 million ledger updates without failure and offered throughput of 1,500 transactions per second.

The Bank of England has concluded a successful project to send transactions between two RTGS systems using Ripple.

Additionally, Ripple’s Regulatory Affairs team has engaged central banks across the world to assess the implications of DLT for their economies, most recently via a Central Bank Summit that attracted over 30 delegates to New York City in October 2017.

Driving infrastructure innovation

Ripple is now taking the next logical step to help build the Internet of Value, by establishing an Infrastructure Innovation initiative. We’ll offer our technology products and deep expertise in both payment systems and DLT to enable central banks and market infrastructures to innovate on their own digital journey. We can provide proven building blocks for both regulators and commercial banks to pilot real-world solutions in collaboration with the Ripple team. We’re excited about the possibilities for innovation — to create regional networks, to reduce the systemic costs of payments, to open up networks to new participants while managing risks tightly with more granular information and smart automation.

Ripple’s Infrastructure Innovation team will be led by Dilip Rao, a veteran at Ripple since July 2014. Rao has led the business development in the APAC/MENA region and worked closely with banks as well as central banks and market infrastructures. He has over 30 years of experience working with banking technology and innovation in payments and understands Ripple’s solutions well.

As our new Global Head, Infrastructure Innovation, Rao will engage with known and new stakeholders responsible for the world’s payment infrastructure, bringing a consulting mindset to explore new concepts with the backing of Ripple’s technologists.

“My first priority will be piloting interoperability between payment systems, the use of DLT for domestic clearing and settlement and novel applications of xCurrent as well as our digital asset XRP,” said Rao. “I look forward to exciting new initiatives in building the Internet of Value in 2018!”

Ripple invites central banks and financial market infrastructure leaders to reach out and work with Ripple on these new frontiers.