Frustrated by a poor web wallet experience that led to his losing $1,000 worth of Bitcoin at a time when the currency hovered around $10, BRD Co-Founder Aaron Voisine set out to build a digital wallet that would be so safe and easy-to-use that even his grandmother could use it to tap into digital assets.
Today, that vision has resulted in BRD—a non-custodial wallet that brings utility, access and control to digital assets by making it simple, secure and convenient to use in payments or to trade. BRD is the fastest growing consumer crypto wallet in the world, with more than 3 million users in 170 countries.
In response to growing demand from its customers for access to more digital assets, specifically those with proven use cases, BRD is now adding support for XRP to its wallet. Support will come first on iOS, followed by Android. Voisine is excited about this new capability because it’s representative of the evolution he’s witnessed in the digital asset market.
“What began as an experiment for developers and early adopters who thought it was interesting, has now passed through a speculative and volatile phase into stable stores of value that will lead to more consumer applications,” said Voisine.
The support of XRP is especially important for BRD because the digital asset has proven its scalability and utility for real and specific use cases like remittance and cross-border payments initiatives. That capability allows BRD to offer a range of assets that are complementary and backfill gaps in each.
XRP and the recent Xpring investment in BRD is also a key part of the company expansion of its original vision for “grandma’s wallet” to the enterprise world. Voisine remarked that XRP will be one of the first currencies in BRD’s new Blockset product, an enterprise-grade API and hosting solution for blockchain data.
This new service is envisioned as a high-uptime, high-availability SaaS-like service for banks and other crypto businesses that need access to Bitcoin, XRP and other blockchain data—but who find it cost-prohibitive or too difficult to maintain on their own.
Beyond Blockset, BRD also plans to capitalize on its relationship with Ripple to help develop Xpring’s API that could bring new functionality to the product and make it even easier to deploy.
Looking ahead to the coming year and decade, Voisine is bullish on the overall prospects for digital assets. He is encouraged by the number of investment banks offering digital asset services to their customers.
Ultimately, we at Ripple are inspired by BRD and their work to democratize access to and the use of digital assets for consumers and businesses alike. And we are honored that they have turned to XRP and the Ripple community to help realize that vision.