While not much has transpired since my last Ripple News update, there have been a few recent developments that I wanted to touch on this week.
It almost never fails, just about the time I wrap up an article and shoot it over for approval and publishing, something else occurs that would have fit perfectly. That was the case last week when it was revealed that Binance’s official wallet, TrustWallet, now supports XRP and credit card payments.
This means that you can purchase XRP, BTC, ETH, BCH, and LTC with your major credit and debt cards, but you’ll want to review the TOS as their press release didn’t include details regarding fees or supported payment methods. This marks the continued progress of Binance and TrustWallet, the latter of which was only compatible with Ethereum-based tokens when it was acquired by Binance less than a year ago.
It was also announced last week that SIX, the Swiss stock exchange, plans to soon list an XRP-based exchange-traded product (ETP) from Amun AG.
Other exchanges recently announced new XRP listings as well:
- Rain – a Shariah-compliant crypto exchange.
- CODEX Crypto Exchange – an Estonian-based crypto exchange.
- Bitbuy Canadian Exchange – Canadian-based digital asset exchange.
The collaborative banking platform, 2gether, announced that their soon-to-be-launched Visa card will support XRP. Once released, it will be fee-free and cardholders in Eurozone countries will be able to use their cards to spend cryptocurrency, pay with fiat, and use the card to quickly convert crypto into fiat.
In last week’s article, I discussed the Twitter poll from PayGlobal regarding adding XRP and I have to say, those folks don’t mess around. A mere 8 days after the poll, PayGlobal announced that they now support XRP. In their official release, PayGlobal said “You can easily exchange XRP to fiat and send to your existing bank card or bank account and in the U you can get cash at ATM’s with no bank card needed.”
Another huge move for XRP was revealed this week when it was announced that Wietse Wand’s developer bounty campaign has produced a winner. Jesper Wallin developed a plugin and XRP has now been integrated with WooCommerce, meaning you can now send XRP via Microsoft Outlook with an API add-on known as Money Message. The developer plans to bring this option to Gmail via an extension in the near future, but for now it s only available for Microsoft Outlook 2016 with support for Office 365.
Ripple is definitely fun to watch right now, there’s something new almost every day. While the price dipped slightly to end the week, XRP is still a favorite among many and Q2 could be quite interesting.
