On Tuesday (November 9), the first day of the two-day virtual “Ripple Swell Global 2021” conference, FinTech firm Ripple announced “Liquidity Hub“, which it describes as “a one stop shop for enterprises to source any tokenized asset.”

In a blog post published yesterday, Ripple said that it envisions “a crypto-first future”, in which “every company will have a strategy for how to leverage crypto, tokenized assets, smart contracts and more to transfer value and fuel a rising tide of global digital transactions and commerce.”

To make it for financial services firms to “easily and efficiently source digital assets from the broader crypto market”, Ripple plans to launch “a crypto liquidity platform” that will “leverage smart order routing to source digital assets at optimized prices from market makers, exchanges, and OTC desks.” Enterprise clients can use Liquidity Hub to “easily and seamlessly provide their end customers with the ability to buy, sell and hold digital assets at the best possible prices across a range of venues.”

Ripple Liquidity Hub will start with support for $BTC, $ETH, $LTC, $ETC, $BCH and $XRP (“availability will vary by geography”) and in the future, it will add support for more digital assets and it will introduce additional functionality, e.g. “staking and yield generating functionalities.”

RippleNet General Manager Asheesh Birla told potential and existing enterprise clients in a Twitter thread that Liquidity Hub is “a one stop shop” to “source any tokenized asset (yes, really) for your customers from liquidity venues like MMs, ce/de exchanges, etc complete w/ a streamlined API, optimized pricing & smart routing.”

He went on to say:

  • “We’ve been using this product internally for nearly 2 yrs to source XRP liquidity from the broader market for ODL flows and now making it available to our customers, as well as any enterprise ready to be part of the inevitable crypto-first future“
  • “Liquidity Hub opens for GA in 2022, starting with XRP, BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC and ETC (varying by jurisdiction) with plans to add other tokenized assets like NFTs, and capabilities like staking and yield generation. This is just the beginning“

Ripple’s blog post also mentioned that the first company to use the alpha version of Liquidity Hub will be Bitcoin ATM firm Coinme, which on 13 September 2019 announced that that “Ripple’s Xpring and the newly established Blockchain Finance Fund have made investments in the company as part of Coinme’s recently opened A-1 funding round.”

Birla told CNBC that you could think of Liquidity Hub as “an aggregator for various liquidity venues and individual assets, the way that Google Flights is for airlines and flights.”

Birla went on to say:

“Companies doing this today have to park working capital at an exchange while waiting for funds from weekend activity to be deposited in a bank account. We started offering this as part of ODL and it’s one of our most sought after features.“

Highly respected and popular Japan-based crypto analyst “CryptoEri”, who is one of the biggest influencers in the XRP community and the host of the “Crypto Eri” YouTube channel, told her over 160K Twitter followers that this move by Ripple represented “a big step to be the Amazon of this space.”

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.