Ripple Raises $200M

Ripple, the San Francisco-based Blockchain specialist, just raised $200 million, lifting their valuation to $10 billion.

This Series-C round table was led by the American investment group Tetragon and involved investments from SBI Holdings and Route 66 Ventures.
Goal: strengthen their presence on the market for cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technologies.
Ripple was founded in 2012 and built a real-time Blockchain-based payment protocol. They also focus on cryptocurrencies-powered transfers and they issue their own virtual currency called XRP. XRP is the third-largest digital asset after Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Achievements:
- $320 million raised so far.
- 300 partner financial institutions including UBS, Santander and UniCredit.
- Their customer base increased by 50% in 2019.
Ambition: Ripple intends to further increase their customer base (by 30 to 40%) and their transaction volume (by 600%) in 2020.
This funding Series would enable them to boost their workforce through the addition of new skills and meet demands from their customers and the XRP community.

Strengthening their strategy. While many Blockchain-focused start-ups slowed down their growth pace, or even ended their operations, and Ripple insists on their strong financial position. This FinTech now aims at speeding up their development.
Challenging SWIFT. Ripple’s technology directly challenges the secure interbank messaging service SWIFT. SWIFT also implemented a new system for the sake increasing transactions' speed and teamed with the industry consortium R3 on experimenting the Corda blockchain.
Geographical expansion. Ripple aims for more territories and may be aiming for Thailand and Australia in 2020. Other APAC, EMEA and LATAM countries (including Brazil) are considered.

In June 2019, Ripple announced a strategic partnership with the money transfer specialist MoneyGram. The point was to enable MoneyGram to process money transfers faster. Ripple also intends to boost the adoption of their own cryptocurrency.
Just like MoneyGram, several institutions are looking into Blockchain technologies. Just days ago, ING said they were interested in developing a service for storing and securing digital assets. Other e-banking players could end up betting on Blockchain-entailed opportunities.

Category : Alertes quotidiennes