Ripple’s senior vice president of product and corporate development, Asheesh Birla, has revealed that over 20% of all transactions the firm conducts on its global network of financial institutions use the XRP-powered On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) solution.
According to a tweetstorm Birla published, On-Demand Liquidity is increasingly being used for RippleNet transactions. ODL facilitates cross-border payments with the use of the XRP cryptocurrency, the third-largest cryptoasset by market cap.
Birla’s comments came as he mentioned the price of bitcoin has been going up, while the decentralized finance space has been seeing investors lock more and more funds in it, and the adjusted transaction value for stablecoins hit a new all-time high, likely thanks to global uncertainty surrounding fiat currencies.
Moreover, the Ripple executive asserted many in the cryptocurrency space are now focusing on the utility of cryptoassets and not just speculating on their price. This, he said, is leading to a “melding of the old world and new.” As a result, it’s “only a matter of time” before banks offer crypto custody services and lending as they see consumer interest in decentralized finance.
While initially centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance provided fiat currency on and off-ramps, now decentralized exchanges are “gaining momentum” to provide liquidity, while fiat on and off-ramps are being provided by stablecoins, Birla said.
The executives’ comments came amid a flurry of high-profile XRP transactions being detected on the blockchain, including one moving 60 million XRP tokens, worth $17.3 million, to Jed McCaleb.
McCaleb, it’s worth noting, helped start Ripple and was allocated 9.5 billion XRP tokens from the cryptocurrency’s total supply of nearly 100 billion. He then left the firm and, in 2014, he announced he was liquidating his holdings and the price of XRP plummeted as a result.
To stop the price of XRP from tanking, Ripple ended up entering a seven-year agreement with him, limiting his monthly and annual sales limits. Per the agreement, he can sell one billion XRP in the sixth year, and two billion in the seventh.
Featured image via Pixabay.
