Coinspeaker
Santander UK Not Using XRP for Payments, but Ripple Fans Still Have the Reason to Rejoice

UK-based financial institution and Ripple‘s partner Banco Santander confused Twitter users by their announcement on March 23. The bank wrote that they are using XRP for international payments to 19 countries, including the US.

Hey Wes, we're doing great. We're using XRP for international payments to 18 EU countries and the USA. This is on our iPhone app called One Pay FX. ^TC

— Santander UK Help (@santanderukhelp) March 23, 2019

Later, responding to an XRP enthusiast, the company apologized for providing incorrect information. It turned out Santander UK confused Ripple with XRP and, in reality, is using Ripple’s xCurrent for international payments in various European countries along with the US through its app One Pay FX.

We are sorry, unfortunately due to a misunderstanding we have given incorrect information. We do apologise for the confusion this has caused. One Pay FX uses xCurrent only. You can find out more here: https://t.co/EGWMMqZhkA.

— Santander UK Help (@santanderukhelp) March 24, 2019

During the last year, Ripple was trying to disassociate itself from the XRP cryptocurrency, but many enthusiasts and companies still have trouble to understand what is the difference between these two notions. Let us get all straightened out.

Ripple is a San Francisco-based company founded in 2012 that provides one frictionless experience to send money globally using the power of blockchain. Ripple is built upon a distributed open source protocol, and supports tokens representing fiat currency, cryptocurrency, commodities, or other units of value such as frequent flier miles or mobile minutes. It is not the crypto, it is just the company that uses the XRP digital asset and leverages its features.

As for XRP, it is an independent digital asset native to the Ripple Consensus Ledger. XRP exists outside of Ripple Connect that is high in liquidity and has fast transactions. Built for enterprise use, XRP offers banks and payment providers a reliable, on-demand option to source liquidity for cross-border payments. Its scalability allows handling 1,500 transactions per second, and as the developers state, XRP can scale to handle the same throughput as Visa.

To put it short, Ripple is a company that uses XRP, and XRP is an independent currency built on XRP Ledger that can not be owned by any single entity, including Ripple.

Santander UK is a large retail and commercial bank based in the UK and a wholly owned subsidiary of the major global bank Banco Santander. It is one of the leading personal financial services companies and one of the largest providers of mortgages and savings in the UK with a turnover of over $80 billion. . The bank has about 20,000 employees, 15 million active customers (including 5.5 million digital customers), with over 800 branches and 64 corporate business centres.

When leading banks started shifting their activities to the crypto direction, Santander was no exception. In April last year, Santander published a press release where they announced working with Ripple in order to improve its services. Santander also invested in Ripple via InnoVentures, their fintech venture capital fund. The release stated:

“The new service (Santander One Pay FX) uses xCurrent, a technology based on distributed ledgers owned by California-based Ripple. InnoVentures, Santander’s $200 million fintech venture capital fund, invested in Ripple in 2015.”

The recent announcement about using XRP made users really confused. One of them wrote:

“I hope this retraction is correct because if you are using XRP and then denying it could be construed as manipulation of news.”

XRP has been lately on the news due to their steps to achieve mass adoption. Recently, we reported about the intention of Ripple-backed XRPL Labs to add XRP payment plugin to the WooCommerce, one of the most popular payment platforms on the internet.

A week and a half later, the implementation of the plan was just in the pipeline, as a developer Jesper Wallin submitted a completed payment gateway plugin designed to enable WooCommerce users to easily accept XRP as a payment method. This means that WooCommerce users are now able to accept XRP as a means of payment.

As for the XRP price, it seems that XRP/USD is getting ready for the breakout. Currently, XRP makes up $0,31 per coin.

Santander UK Not Using XRP for Payments, but Ripple Fans Still Have the Reason to Rejoice

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