On Monday (29 October 2018), Ripple’s Director of Product, Craig DeWitt, on the sixth episode of “The Ripple Drop” (Ripple’s web video series), talked with producer/editor Reinhard Cate about RippleNet’s multi-hop feature, and explained what benefits it offers.

Multi-hop is a feature of the Interledger Protocol (ILP). On Friday (28 September 2018), as reported hereRipple announced via a post on its “Insights” blog that Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), Thailand’s first domestic bank (founded in 1906), had become the first financial institution on RippleNet to use this feature.

Craig’s Interview With Reinhard

Q: What is multi-hop? How does it work?

“Well, first off, multi-hop gives RippleNet members the ability of transacting with banks or payment providers or digital wallets that they don’t have a direct relationship to. That’s so important because in today’s world, you need a bunch of bilateral relationships clunkily put together in a chain in order to move money. That means A has a relationship with B. B has a relationship with C. And they have to hand off information like playing a game of telephone. Multi-hop makes that a thing of the past.”

Q: So, who on RippleNet is using this feature?

“So, a couple of weeks ago, we announced that Siam Commercial Bank was using multi-hop. And what that means is that they are allowing customers to facilitate payments through Siam Commercial Bank into Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. So, the sender has the ability of getting deep reach and deep access into this entire region, and the receiver has the ability of getting payments with more value in them because the fees are less with complete visibility and transparency.”

Q: And is this relationship both ways?

“Yeah, that’s exactly right. So, one of the great things about the technology that underpins this is that it works like the internet works. Information can go both ways. So, Cambodia can facilitate payments outside of that relationship back into RippleNet. Very much how the internet works today. So, like the internet, there’s a lot of paths for getting your money or your information where it needs to go. So, one of the things that multi-hop allows are multiple quotes being returned to the user, and those quotes will have different paths of payments that are available. So, you can choose based on the cheapest path or the fastest path, and make sure that you’re able to deliver your customers the type of experience they need. And what’s great about this is that some of these paths, what we’re seeing already in terms of the tests that we’re doing, are the cheapest and the fastest when they go through xRapid. 

What David Schwartz (Ripple’s CTO) Has Said About Multi-Hop

And this is what he means by “regional banks”:

David explains the significance of multi-hop:

What Dilip Rao (Global Head, Infrastructure Innovation) Has Said About Multi-Hop

 

Featured Image Courtesy of Ripple