On Wednesday (17 October 2018), Omni, the startup that raised $25 million from Ripple’s incubator arm Xpring back in December 2017, announced that it had integrated XRP as a currency into the Omni marketplace.

Xpring is an initiative by Ripple launched in May 2018. It supports “businesses that would see material benefit from building on the XRP Ledger.” The goal is to “invest in, incubate, acquire and provide grants to companies and projects run by proven entrepreneurs that use the XRP Ledger and the digital asset XRP to solve their customers’ problems in a transformative way.”

Ripple speed, scale, and stability are the characteristics that “make XRP and the XRP Ledger game-changing innovations that entrepreneurs could apply across identity, trade finance, gaming and virtual goods, provenance, real estate, insurance, digital media and many more industries.” Ripple says it formed Xpring because it “recognizes the vast, still untapped potential of the ledger and the asset for uses cases beyond the company’s focus: removing friction from global payments.”

Omni , which is based in San Francisco, could be considered an “on-demand personal storage concierge.” You could also look at Omni as a local community (one per city) marketplace that lets you do three things:

  • store your things (Omni picks up them up, photographs them, and stores them for you)
  • rent things (rent things from other community members that you want to try but you don’t want to buy)
  • earn money from renting our your things (to other community members)

When you rent out your things, you can either choose to earn credit to spend at Omni, or you can choose to “cash out” your earnings. 

Here is how the pricing works:

  • “When you rent items from the Omni community you only pay for the days you need them.”
  • “Pay for what you store with no minimums, contracts or wasted space. Omni will manage and insure the items for you.” (For example, it will cost around $3 per month to have Omni store a bicycle for you, assuming the storage is for 90+ days.)
  • Pickup or delivery within the service area costs $25.

Two prominent members of Omni’s advisory board are Chris Larsen, co-founder and executive chairman of Ripple, and Stefan Thomas, the former CTO of Ripple.

In the article posted on Omni’s Medium blog, Omni founder and CEO Thomas McLeod says that Omni has integrated XRP into its product so that “Omni members now have the option to cash out their rental earnings to an XRP wallet.” (The other option for cashing out is USD.) He says that this news is significant because “this is the first time that consumers can get XRP outside of an exchange.” 

McLeod adds:

“We’re building towards a world with frictionless access to the things we need as we need them, irrespective of ownership. In order to realize this vision, we set out to implement a payments system that was both instantaneous and global, which is why we partnered with Ripple back in January and why we’re excited to announce the XRP cash out option now. By enabling XRP cash outs we’re aiming to lower the barrier to entry for crypto-curious consumers and also reduce the risk because you still own the asset.”

According to the following tweet by McLeod, Omni is planning many more integrations with XRP and Interledger:

The OImni CEO told TechCrunch:

“In every other crypto investment scenario, you have to risk your cash — this way you can put items you already own to work for you and have them earn XRP while you relax. With this integration, you can basically double dip on ownership-as-investment by both unlocking liquidity early and investing some or all of the proceeds back into the crypto markets.”

 

Featured Image Courtesy of Omni