Ripple’s cryptocurrency, XRP, has had the year from hell. From its January all-time high it has taken one of the heaviest beatings of all the altcoins and plunged 93% to its lowest level of the year on Tuesday. However, parent company Ripple has probably made more partnerships than any other crypto organization so can things finally be turned around for XRP.

Partnership With Bittrex For USD Transactions

In an announcement yesterday the San Francisco based blockchain firm promoted its primary cross border payments platform, xRapid, by revealing three new exchange partners. The blog post stated that in order for the product to see success there needs to be a ‘healthy ecosystem’ of exchange partners to ‘allow xRapid payments to move from one currency into XRP and back into another currency quickly and efficiently.’

The first of these exchange partners to be announced is US crypto exchange Bittrex. The exchange will act as the preferred medium of changing currencies via xRapid into and out of US dollars. To work effectively with Mexico and the Philippines Ripple has also partnered with Bitso and Coins.ph to offer Peso transactions in the two countries respectively.

Cory Johnson, Chief Market Strategist at Ripple, said;

“Bittrex is one of the biggest names in digital asset trading in the U.S. The same goes for Bitso in Mexico and Coins.ph in the Philippines. That makes today’s announcement an important development for xRapid. We’ve seen several successful xRapid pilots already, and as we move the product from beta to production later this year, these exchange partners will allow us to provide financial institutions with the comfort and assurance that their payments will move seamlessly between different currencies.”

Remittances represent a huge volume of foreign exchange in Mexico and especially in the Philippines where they make up over 10% of the island nation’s GDP. Cross border payments can be slow and costly using traditional banking methods, this is where xRapid comes in to alleviate the costs and accelerate the process.

XRP reacted to the news which has provided a long overdue boost to the flailing altcoin. At the time of writing it was trading almost 9% higher on the day and leading the top fifteen cryptocurrencies. XRP is currently trading at $0.317 which is 25% higher than its 2018 low point three days ago. On the month however XRP is still way down, 37% lower than the $0.50 it traded at this time last month.

Ripple continues to forge a way forward with new partnerships so this lull in its crypto coin price is only a temporary speed bump on the digital highway leading to a brighter future for cross border payments.

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