Ripple Partnership Making Waves In Kuwait

A new Ripple partnership has been announced this week, which adds Kuwait Finance House (KFH) as the latest group to jump on board RippleNet, Ripple’s enterprise blockchain network. This move, makes KFH the first company from within Kuwait to create ties with Ripple, suggesting that overall, KFH are well behind Ripple’s vision of technological revolution. Moreover, this news should be seen as quite significant, given that KFH is listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange, with a market capitalisation of $8.2 Billion in May 2016. RippleNet is gaining momentum now, with over 100 different financial institutions now using Ripples services to facilitate cross border payments, as a replacement alternative to SWIFT. According to CCN:

“KFH, which is also Kuwait’s first Islamic bank, underlined its intention to use Ripple’s ‘unique tool’ for cross-border payments for its retail customers. With this, KFH can provide instant and secure cross-border money transfers within seconds, with end-to-end visibility over the journey of the payment.”

“Details of the offering are currently scarce, and it remains to be seen if the bank uses Ripple’s xCurrent, an enterprise blockchain software that enables settlements in fiat or xRapid, a product which uses Ripple’s token cryptocurrency XRP for real-time liquidity for international transactions.”

What should we take away from this? Overall, the news is hardly ground-breaking. It’s not rare to see these sorts of interactions happening within Ripple, however, it is important that these events are reported as, as part of a bigger picture, little announcements can contribute to a far bigger surge, a surge that will hopefully see mainstream Ripple adoption, that is at least, the aim of the team working behind Ripples services. How is Ripple performing at the moment? As a currency, as we know, XRP has seen better days. At the time of writing, XRP is valued at$0.61, down 0.13%. At the moment, Ripple and XRP are stuck in limbo, unable to earn value but fortunately, also not losing value. This is the result of an unsteady market so therefore, we expect to see this bland trend to continue for a few days. As we enter the weekend though, into the first few days of June, we could see some life injected back into the markets, how, and when this will happen though, we can’t be sure just yet. We’ll have to wait and see what comes of the very busy markets.