At Ripple, we’re enabling the world to move value like information moves today. It’s this vision, known as the Internet of Value (IoV), that drives everything we do: from building our global payments network, RippleNet, to establishing initiatives like Xpring—which is helping scale innovative blockchain projects through partnership and investment.
Today, we are thrilled to announce the next evolution of Xpring—now the open developer platform for money. Similar to how RippleNet is a growing global network for financial institutions, Xpring will become a global network for developers.
This new platform offers a set of tools, services and programs that makes it easier for developers to send and receive payments in any currency, across any network, using the XRP Ledger and Interledger Protocol. In short, Xpring removes the pain and friction from integrating money into apps.
Unlocking Economic Value
Payments today are antiquated. They can take days to arrive and operate in a maze of siloed networks. Traditional payment rails were built decades ago and do not meet today’s business and consumer demands for reliable, fast, convenient and low-cost payments. The time for change is now. In the same way the Internet unlocked economic growth through democratization of information, the IoV will unlock economic value through global access to and digitization of money.
Over the past five years, the Internet accounted for 21% of the GDP growth in mature economies. In a given country, each 1% increase of electronic payments creates $100 billion additional GDP. We believe that the ongoing transformation of the global payments industry will present opportunities to create similarly large and impactful businesses as we saw during the growth of the internet.
The IoV has the opportunity to enable billions of people around the world to instantly make transactions, increase financial inclusion for millions of unbanked consumers and give rise to entirely new businesses and industries. Yet, to bring the IoV to life the developer community needs more.
Realizing IoV Through a Developer Ecosystem
With Xpring, we are arming developers with easy access to technology proven to move money instantly across any payments network.
XRP has the fastest and most scalable settlement of any top digital asset and a proven use case beyond an alternative store of value—cross-border payments via RippleNet. When paired with ILP, XRP bridges the gap between any fiat or digital asset and forms a universal, ubiquitous way to make payments. Developers who build with ILP experience infinite scalability and are not locked into a single crypto ledger. Together, ILP and XRP enable trading in cross-blockchain transactions, micropayments, and web monetization for an array of industries like media and gaming.
But this is just the beginning. Xpring will further improve and build out these technologies and offer developer support, advocacy and partnerships to help them solve real problems faster. Only by growing the developer ecosystem around fast and low-cost payments technology will the real power of XRP and ILP be realized.
Get Involved Today
Change doesn’t happen alone. Ripple is partnering with developers and the community at large to help bring these technologies mainstream and realize the IoV. We are building products that address developer needs who want to be a part of and capitalize on the IoV.
This is our call to the community to get involved. Begin to build features for new use cases on the XRP Ledger. Send test payments with ILP. Build on top of the Xpring SDK. Run a validator. These are just some of the ways the industry will continue to move forward together.
Share your thoughts with us on the XRP Chat Forums or reach out to the Xpring team.