Ripple plans to enter the Chinese market

Ripple intends to conquer the Chinese market using DLT technology to speed up cross-border payments. “We're definitely interested in China,” Jeremy Light, vice president of strategy at Ripple, told CNBC.

Earlier this year, the Blockchain company struck a deal with Hong Kong-based financial services company LianLian International to provide its services to enable cross-border payments between China, the US and Europe. By entering the Chinese market, the company is not seeking to promote its XRP cryptocurrency, as trading in digital currencies is prohibited in China, but rather will offer the technology behind the cryptocurrency. Ripple's distributed ledger technology differs from the Blockchain technology of other cryptocurrencies in that transactions are verified by a network of independent servers owned by banks, retailers and traders, rather than miners, who verify transactions on the public network of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Ripple currently has partnerships with more than 100 financial institutions, including Santander, UniCredit, UBS and Standard Chartered. But getting at least one partner in China will not be so easy. China has many large fintech companies, and popular payment apps include Ant Financial's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat Pay.

Ripple has already established partnerships in Asia, developing an app in partnership with sixty-one domestic lenders Money Tap, which helps banks in Japan process payments around the clock. Most banks and financial firms are not interested in the cryptocurrency side of Ripple's offering, its digital token that is used to transfer payments from one currency to another. Instead, lenders struck deals with the company to use its proprietary productxCurrent, which instantly processes payments worldwide.

Ripple's xRapid platform, which uses XRP, is attracting money transfer companies including MoneyGram and Western Union. Both cryptocurrency use cases are in test mode and have not yet launched at a commercial level.

However, the volatility of cryptocurrencies may hinder the adoption of XRP by banks and other financial institutions. Compared to last year's record of $3.81, the price of XRP has fallen by almost 90% and is now around 25 cents.

According to https://www.cnbc.com