CTO Ripple Confirms The Launch Of xCurrent 4.0
TechnologyBit News Today2 min read
David Schwartz announced on Twitter that version 4.0 of Ripple's popular product xCurrent had officially launched.
David Schwartz has served as the chief technology officer of Ripple Labs since July 2018.
In October, Ripple announced that MercuryFX, Cuallix, and Catalyst Corporate Credit Union were adopting xRapid for commercial payments. Several financial institutions, including Thailand's Siam Commercial Bank, Saudi Arabia's SABB, and Santander, have engaged with Ripple technologies.
Community excitement had previously been sparked by news that Santander would use XRP. A spokesman at Banco Santander clarified the bank uses xCurrent only, not xRapid or XRP, to deliver the benefits of its One Pay FX app.
Birla explained that the existing payment system depends on a few large money center banks, such as Citi, that function as hubs. Birla stated that multihop could enable smaller regional institutions, like Thailand's Siam Commercial Bank, to achieve the reach of a larger correspondent bank.
Among the most notable additions are the multihop feature, which allows payments to be relayed through a chain of xCurrent users, and bulk FX functionality, which accounts for financial institutions that do not wish to be tied to xRapid.
For example, under the existing system, financial institutions that need to make a payment in a foreign country can spend months setting up bank accounts in those areas, and funding them with local currency to provide liquidity, according to Birla.
With xRapid, companies instead exchange the sending country's currency for XRP to purchase the destination country's currency. For example, a company based in the originating country would instead trade their local currency holdings for XRP, which would then be used to purchase the destination country's currency.
Banks, it turns out, tend to rely on pre-approval of each transaction hop to allay compliance concerns, and the software ensures those hops occur in milliseconds as well.
To support xRapid transfers between U.S. dollars and both Philippine and Mexican pesos, Ripple partnered with digital exchanges Bittrex, Coins.ph, and Bitso.
In the first two months following the launch of the updated version, no new firms publicly adopted the product offering on-demand liquidity.
