Ripple makes the news almost every couple of days however the price of its cryptocurrency, XRP, just cannot gain traction at the moment. Partnerships keep coming and the San Francisco company’s network keeps expanding. This week’s announcement is a new smartphone application to enable on-demand payments for Japanese banks and their customers.
The announcement was made yesterday on the company blog. It stated that the Japan Bank Consortium, already RippleNet partners, will be releasing an app called ‘MoneyTap’ later this year. The app is a first of its kind operating with multiple banks; it will allow bank customers to make transactions instantly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Bank Transfers Revolutionized
SBI Ripple Asia heads the 61 member bank consortium which accounts for 80% of all banking assets in Japan. The Ripple blockchain powered app will revolutionize domestic payments within the country which are currently limited to office and banking hours on weekdays only.
MoneyTap will work with a bank account, phone number, or QR code and will offer high speed, low cost transactions, eliminating much of the time and expense with existing transfer protocols.
Takashi Okita, CEO of SBI Ripple Asia said;
“We are proud to leverage Ripple’s blockchain technology through our new mobile app, MoneyTap, to improve the payments infrastructure in Japan. Together with the trust, reliability and reach of the bank consortium, we can remove friction from payments and create a faster, safer, and more efficient domestic payments experience for our customers.”
RippleNet has over 100 partners already utilizing the xCurrent transfer system and several others using or testing the XRP powered xRapid system. Director of joint venture partnerships at Ripple, Emi Yoshikawa, said;
“The release of the MoneyTap mobile app shows Ripple’s continued commitment to provide its partners across Asia and the world with blockchain-powered solutions that dramatically improve the customer payments journey. We’re proud to provide this production-ready technology that not only improves the international payments experience, but also have applications for domestic payments infrastructure.”
As with previous partnership announcements and company developments XRP’s price has not reacted and is still in decline with all of its crypto siblings. The altcoin enjoyed a fomo induced spike back to $1.05 a couple of days ago when the Coinbase listing rumors appeared again but has since tumbled back to its previous level at just over $0.90. Investors have been left wondering why Ripple’s cryptocurrency is not performing as well as the company is.