On Monday (August 5), Asheesh Birla, Ripple’s Senior VP of Product, talked about the company’s XRP-powered product xRapid.

His comments came in response to a question by Twitter user “@ipinky77” who asked the following question:

xRapid is “a solution for on-demand liquidity that reduces reliance on pre-funding by enabling money to be sent from one currency and instantly settled in the destination currency”. xRapid uses XRP, which is the “native digital asset of the XRP Ledger”, as a “real-time bridge between the sending and receiving currencies.” 

As for ILP, which stands for Interledger Protocol, in June 2018, Ripple CTO David Schwartz compared ILP with Internet Protcol (IP), the principal communications protocol of the internet:

“In the same way IP became a universal format for sharing data across many different networks and beneath many different applications, the Interledger Protocol (ILP) — an open protocol suite for sending payments across different ledgers — will become the universal format for sharing payments across many different ledgers… For Ripple, ILP is an important component of our product strategy. We hear from many of our banking customers that it’s imperative to keep their transactions private, process thousands every second, and accommodate every type of currency and asset imaginable… That’s why we integrated ILP into xCurrent so that it could help process instant and certain transactions across an infinite number of ledgers — including blockchains like the XRP Ledger. This approach takes the best of blockchain but addresses its key limitations, which separates Ripple from blockchain companies and consortiums still stuck doing experiments… By connecting bank ledgers and existing infrastructure investments via ILP, banks are taking the first steps in improving global payments today — and in enabling a true Internet of Value.”

Birla replied:

In related Ripple news, as CryptoGlobe reported earlier this week, on August 2, MoneyGram International (“MoneyGram”) CEO, Alex Holmes, talked about his company’s partnership with Ripple during a Q2 2019 Results Conference Call.

During the prepared statements section of the earnings call—which is “a conference call between the management of a public company, analysts, investors, and the media to discuss the company’s financial results during a given reporting period, such as a quarter”—MoneyGram Chairman and CEO Alex Holmes had some interesting things to say about Ripple, xRapid, and XRP. (The Seeking Alpha website has the full transcript of this earnings call.)

Regarding the strategic partnership with Ripple, Holmes started by saying that this was one of the “three important achievements” that helped MoneyGram improve its “long-term capital structure and credit standing.”

Next, he said that MoneyGram had started “transacting on the Ripple xRapid platform” earlier that week and that “all signs point to this being a tremendously beneficial relationship for all parties involved.”

Even better was how the MoneyGram CEO expressed his excitement about xRapid:

We're literally settling currencies in second, and to quote my friend Larry, this is really cool.

Furthermore, Holmes said that this partnership with Ripple will help improve MoneyGram’s settlement engine and that MoneyGram’s innovations lab “continues to explore new and exciting use cases for crypto, DLT and blockchain as we look to build the business model of the future.”

And finally, as Global Trade Review (GTR) reported on July 3, one of their reporters interviewed Marjan Delatinne, Ripple’s Global Head of Banking, on June 26.

Delatinne revealed that xRapid has 20 financial institutions using it:

xRapid went live last October, so it’s a very new product, but we have more than 20 financial institutions using it.