Ripple Event Reveal: 3 Companies Are Now Using XRP for Real Payments

After a series of highly-publicized pilots, three companies are now making commercial use of Ripple's xRapid product.

XRapid employs the digital asset XRP, using it as a "Bridge currency" in cross-border payments, which according to the company, reduces the cost and increases the speed of these payments by boosting liquidity.

The three companies - MercuryFX, Cuallix and Catalyst Corporate Credit Union - were announced by Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse on stage at Ripple's Swell conference in San Francisco today, marking the first time companies have put the product to commercial use.

A number of other firms have trialed xRapid in the past, including Western Union, MoneyGram, Viamericas and IDT. These firms are not putting xRapid into production at this time, Ripple SVP of product Asheesh Birla told CoinDesk, but he added, "We are still working on next steps" with some of them.

Ripple holds the majority of the XRP tokens in existence, selling them continuously through its subsidiary XRP II. XRP is currently the third-most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization, based on investors' bet that Ripple's product suite will eventually displace the current infrastructure for cross-border payments, including nostro and vostro accounts and the aging SWIFT messaging system.

In contrast, xRapid processes cross-border payments by XRP, with the sending party putting fiat into a cryptocurrency exchange, converting it to XRP, and converting that XRP to the receiving party's desired fiat currency.

xCurrent does not use XRP, and Ripple has sent mixed signals in the past regarding banks' interest in xRapid.

Birla told CoinDesk in a recent interview, "We built xCurrent as a product to get banks started - we'll start them using fiat transfers and then we'll introduce later on the ability to use digital assets through xRapid. So we're layering on xRapid on top of xCurrent."

As noted above, Ripple sells XRP on a continual basis through a subsidiary, so all else being equal, an increase in demand for XRP would boost Ripple's revenues.

"The xRapid product leverages XRP, so if you are doing a million dollars a payment through xRapid, that is a million dollars of XRP that you would need."