Coinbase Chooses Ripple (XRP) Over Any Other Cryptocurrency For Its Cross-Border Payments

News has broken out that major American exchange Coinbase has begun venturing into cross-border payments, and will use Ripple’s XRP to facilitate the feature. 

The funds can be transferred to any country that Coinbase supports. The process uses the XRP token and the USD Coin (USDC). However, it does require the recipient to be able to convert XRP and USDC into local currency. The page reads,

You can now send money to any user with a Coinbase account around the world using XRP or USDC. By using cryptocurrencies that are optimized for cross-border transmission, you can send and receive money virtually instantly by sending those cryptocurrencies and having the recipient convert them into local currency. There’s zero fee for sending to other Coinbase users and a nominal on-chain network fee for sending outside of Coinbase.

The listing of Ripple on Coinbase caused quite a stir in the community as the token violated one of Coinbase’s criteria listed in their Digital Assets Framework. However, the XRP continues to remain on the exchange. 

Stellar Lumens (XLM) would have been another option for Coinbase, but the exchange is going with Ripple for the service. Meanwhile, Stellar is working with IBM to help banks launch stablecoins, which Ripple CTO David Schwartz thinks “misses the point completely.”

Ripple has been making great headway as far as partners are concerned in recent months, scoring wins in different continents. India’s Federal Bank also declared that it would use Ripple’s technology to facilitate cross-border payments. Meanwhile, Japan’s SBI Holdings and Japanese investors seem very optimistic about Ripple’s potential, with the CEO of the former believing that many banks will use it by 2025, and the latter believing that Ripple’s XRP will show the greatest growth among all tokens in 2019.