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Ripple and Santander Bring Blockchain to International Payments

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Santander

Major financial institution Santander recently announced that they have partnered with Ripple to provide international bank transfers. Despite arriving on the scene fairly recently, compared with other altcoins, Ripple has proven itself to be a cryptocurrency dynamo. Their meteoric rise to relevancy began late last year and resulted in a slew of major partnerships, including Santander. Santander itself is a global banking group with branches across Europe, North and South America. While Ripple established itself as the payment protocol of choice for progressive banks, this is the first full-scale release.

Santander’s Recent Announcement

Santander’s UK CEO jubilantly announced their upcoming app at the International Fintech conference in London. The app would help facilitate cross-border payments in a matter of hours rather than a matter of days. Unsurprisingly, they chose Ripple to help facilitate this functionality. The app will initially serve four markets; the UK, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil.

They further expanded on the trial program they ran in 2016. Staff assigned to test the protocol reported their transfers taking less than a day. This is particularly impressive when you take into account the average transfer time on legacy banking networks. These outdated financial back-end networks can take days to process a cross-border payment, sometimes up to a week. Unlike traditional transfers, that require intermediaries as they travel internationally, RippleNet is processed entirely internally. As such, costs are significantly lower than comparable current networks.

Adoption at this level is advantageous for Santander but also establishes a precedent. Other financial institutions will have to provide comparable speeds or risk irrelevancy.

How RippleNet Augments International Payments

Ripple’s product suite includes three separate modules, of which Santander chose xCurrent. The xCurrent network grew out of the original RippleNet platform. Compared with xVia and xRapid, xCurrent is more focused on international transfers and thus is the perfect fit for Santander’s new app. Along with the expected advantages of a distributed ledger for currency transactions, xCurrent offers in-network messaging. This messaging is critical for end-to-end confirmations that are necessary for cross-border payments.

xCurrent also includes the Ripple produced rulebook – an attempt to set an inter-bank standard for network platforms. Legacy networks often communicate poorly with one another. Although these issues were long ago solved in the consumer computing industry, they persist in financial institutions. Standardization through Ripple’s rulebook would help alleviate these problems.

Also beneficial is RippleNet’s internal fiat exchange, a feature available on several of Ripple’s products. Using their XRP cryptocurrency as a medium, RippleNet can rapidly transfer one currency to another. Even currencies that do not have a traditional trading pair can use XRP as a bridge currency. The fiat sold by the initial user remains within RippleNet in a liquidity pool until it is needed on the other side of a transaction.

Ripple Paves the Way for Blockchain Adoption

This is the first forward facing cross-border payment solution to use Ripple’s products. It is not, however, the only major partnership working towards blockchain integration. Western Union announced that they commenced a trial operation with Ripple’s xRapid product. The xRapid network focuses on the liquidity solutions offered through RippleNet. Ripple has also made inroads into the Asian markets with LianLian and SBI Holdings in China and Japan, respectively.

Ripple proved itself as a blockchain powerhouse, seizing the number three spot by market cap. Over the course of the past few years, Ripple’s partnerships made them stand out in a field of struggling altcoins. The future is bright for Ripple’s payment protocol, and early adopters still stand to capitalize on this fact.

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Disclaimer: This article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide, investment advice. Global Coin Report and/or its affiliates, employees, writers, and subcontractors are cryptocurrency investors and from time to time may or may not have holdings in some of the coins or tokens they cover. Please conduct your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency and read our full disclaimer.

Image courtesy of Mike Mozart via Flickr

Altcoins

XNO Token of Xeno NFT Hub listed on Bithumb Korea Exchange

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Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 25th January, 2021, // ChainWire //

Xeno Holdings Limited (xno.live ), a blockchain solutions company based in Hong Kong, has announced the listing of its ecosystem utility token XNO on the ‘Bithumb Korea’ cryptocurrency exchange on January 21st 2021.

Xeno NFT Hub (market.xno.live ), developed by Xeno Holdings, enables easy minting of digital items into NFTs while also providing a marketplace where anyone can securely trade NFTs.

The Xeno NFT Hub project team includes former members of the technology project Yosemite X based in San Francisco and professionals such as Gabby Dizon who is a games industry expert and NFT space influencer based in Southeast Asia.

NFT(Non-Fungible Token) technology has recently gained huge focus in the blockchain arena and beyond, making waves in the online gaming sector, the art world, and the digital copyrights industry in recent years. The strongest feature of NFTs is that “NFTs are unique digital assets that cannot be replaced or forged”. Unlike fungible tokens such as Bitcoin or Ether, NFTs are not interchangeable for other tokens of the same type but instead each NFT has a unique value and specific information that cannot be replaced. This fact makes NFTs the perfect solution to record and prove ownership of digital and real-world items like works of art, game items, limited-edition collectibles, and more. One of the ways to have a successful…

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Altcoins

Should Crypto Projects Devote Resources to Community Growth and Marketing?

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2020 has been an incredible year for crypto as investors have generated windfall profits and crypto projects have seen their businesses gain the spotlight they’ve been looking for.  While Bitcoin has received most of the attention after major institutional investors announced they were accumulating the increasingly scarce asset, many altcoins have also seen their fair share of glory.  When looking at all the big winners of the past year, the first project that probably comes to mind is Chainlink, having appreciated by more than 550% YTD and now valued at over $4.5 billion.  But, the actual biggest winner of the year is HEX with a YTD return of over 5,000%.

I mention both of the above projects as they have each taken slightly different paths to achieve greatness.  Chainlink has devoted resources toward building a fundamentally sound business with many strategic partnerships while HEX has spent vast sums of money on marketing and promotion.  Both approaches are valid, but one thing is certain, it is absolutely imperative for crypto projects to let the crypto community know what makes them special.  Of course, one of the reasons that makes crypto so valuable is the powerful blockchain technology that most projects are utilizing.

Cryptocurrency vs. Blockchain Technology

It’s important to make a distinction between blockchain technology and cryptocurrency.  Although they are often used interchangeably, they are different.  Blockchain technology and crypto were both created after the 2008 financial crisis, but cryptocurrency…

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Altcoins

XENO starts VIP NFT trading service and collaborates with contemporary artist Hiro Yamagata

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Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 24th December, 2020, // ChainWire //

The XENO NFT Hub (https://xno.live) will provide a crypto-powered digital items and collectables trading platform allowing users to create, buy, and sell NFTs. Additionally it will support auction based listings, governance and voting mechanisms, trade history tracking, user rating and other advanced features.

As a first step towards its fully comprehensive service, XENO NFT Hub launched a recent VIP service to select users and early adopters in December 2020 with plans for a full Public Beta to open in June 2021. 

“NFTs are extremely flexible in their usage, from digital event tickets to artwork, and while NFTs have a very wide spectrum of uses and categories XENO will initially focus its partnership efforts and its own item curation on three primary areas: gaming, sports & entertainment, and collectibles.”, said XENO NFT Hub president Anthony Di Franco.

He also added “This does not mean we will prohibit other types of NFTs from our ecosystem However, it simply means that XENO’s efforts as a company will be targeted into these verticals initially as a cohesive business approach.”

Development and Procurement Lead, Gabby Dizon explained, “Despite our initial focus, we found ourselves with a unique opportunity to host some of the works of Mr. Hiro Yamagata. We are collaborating with Japanese artist Hiro Yamagata to enshrine some of his artwork into NFTs.”

Mr. Yamagata has…

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