Ripple Labs, the company behind popular cryptocurrency XRP, has been a major player in the remittance scene. Its on-Demand Liquidity product (ODL), previously known as xRapid has been leveraging XRP, to function as a bridge between two different currencies thus eliminating the need for any type of pre-funding.

Ripple has been taking crypto to the banks and many financial institutions have been using Ripple’s financial products. RippleNet is enabling banks to process cross-border payments while making the process faster and a lot cheaper.

The blockchain company has announced partnerships with SendFriend, JNFX, FTCS, Ahli Bank of Kuwait, Transpaygo, BFC Bahrain, ConnectPay, GMT, WorldCom Finance, Olympia Trust Company, Pontual/USEND, and Rendimento among many others.

The company launched Xpring, the investment arm of the company that incubates, acquires and provide grants to companies and projects that are willing use the digital asset XRP and the XRP Ledger, the open-sourced, decentralized technology behind XRP, to solve their customers’ problems in a transformative way. Xpring has made an array of notable investments in recent months.

XRP ledger gets updated

Now a recent blog post from Warren Paul Anderson, Product Manager of the XRP Ledger and xRapid, states that the XRP ledger has two new updates that add new features to further enhance the blockchain and make it more efficient. The XRP Ledger Devnet has developed these two versions 1.5.0 and 1.6.0-b1, with financial support from Xpring.

The version 1.5.0 rippled version adds support for gRPC API, new RPC methods, API versioning, better handshaking protocol, improved delivery method, improved packet building, and many other bug fixes. The update is set to be deployed on testnet on April 15th. The announcement adds that this update will “give developers an environment for testing their applications with faux XRP that mirrors the latest stable version running on XRP Ledger Mainnet.”

The next version of the blockchain, XRP Ledger v1.6.0, will be released in Beta. The version 1.6.0-n1 includes an upgrade to the XRP Ledger Devnet, which is hosted by the Xpring team at Ripple. Therefore, the Xpring Team is set to invite developers to the updated XRP Ledger Devnet environment to explore new opportunities.

Furthermore, on Wednesday, Ripple’s Xpring team will also be updating its XRP Ledger mainnet servers. Reportedly, after the update, Xpring will also vote to approve new features “which are proposed fixes to the rippled protocol” to the XRP Ledger decentralized features.

Globalizing its products

Ripple has partnered with more than 300 banks and financial institutions to implement its products. Interestingly, 38% of the top 100 banks with the largest assets in the world, according to a 2019 Global Market Intelligence report compiled by XRParcade, have been linked to Ripple. The blockchain company is rapidly conquering the remittance market throughout the globe.

Last month it partnered with DeeMoney, a fintech company based in Thailand that specializes in digital cross-border money transfers, to enable faster and cost-efficient cross-border money transfers. Using RippleNet, over 1 million Thais working globally will be able to transfer money back home at the lowest fees and best rates.

Ripple joined hands with MoneyGram back in June 2019, the deal saw Moneygram using Ripple’s ODL in their daily operations through RippleNet. Moneygram has reportedly been moving 10% of its Mexican peso foreign exchange transaction volume via ODL.