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Recently, Ripple, the company behind the XRP token, announced that it would be investing in remittance company Moneygram. This partnership came with MoneyGram picking up the use of XRP through Ripple’s xRapid product. 

This was indeed a big deal for Ripple as its whole aim is to make the sending and receiving of money across borders easily. And with MoneyGram being the second-biggest remittance company globally, it was a boost for both sides. 

Now, Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, has said that in terms of boosting cryptocurrency in general, this partnership is bigger than the announcement that Facebook would be launching its own cryptocurrency - Libra. 

Boosting each other

Ripple, in its partnership, bought a 10 percent stake in the company, and bought the shares at a premium with an option to buy more down the line. This helped boost the remittance company’s share which skyrocketed on the announcement. 

The advantage for MoneyGram is well documented as they explained that xRapid would make it possible to expand their offerings in terms of different currencies, and it would be a much faster process - getting it down to seconds. 

For Ripple, they are trying to get the adoption of their cryptocurrency up, and they are doing this through partnerships. But, for Garlinghouse, in terms of adoption, this is allegedly a bigger deal than Facebook’s two billion users being exposed to Libra. 

The Moneygram partnership, Garlinghouse claimed, represents one of the first use cases of a crypto asset in production at scale:

“This is a big deal. If I were betting now, a year from now the MoneyGram deal will have a more consequential impact on the crypto markets than the Libra white paper,” the CEO explained

With xRapid volumes are up 170 percent between Q1 and Q2 2019 — even ahead of the MoneyGram development — and this kind of growth has Garlinghouse predicting xRapid would hit over $1 billion in volume by 2020. 

Not forcing it

It was explained that the partnership for Ripple meant they would buy shares at a premium, which was near 4-times the market price. However, In his interview, Garlinghouse denied that Ripple had forked out a premium on MoneyGram shares to ensure the firm would adopt the technology:

‘“I wouldn’t characterize it as an inducement [...] we’re getting more and more customers to sign up and we’re seeing that value. If we want to accelerate that, we have the option of doing things that might be perceived and characterized by some as an inducement.”

Even still, the fact that there is a boost in use cases for XRP and xRapid through Ripple means that the overall growth of cryptocurrencies continues to grow into the mainstream. MoneyGram is a major payments company that is looking to advance its offerings, and it has chosen cryptocurrency to future proof itself.

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