Ripple is no longer limited to moving money. It wants to be the entire pipeline.
The company shared with CoinDesk on Wednesday a press release outlining a major expansion of Ripple Payments that turns the platform into a complete infrastructure layer for the movement of fiat and stablecoin.
Businesses can now collect, hold, exchange and pay in both traditional currencies and stablecoins through a single provider, rather than bringing together separate providers for custody, collections, conversion and settlement.
The new capabilities come from two recent acquisitions. Palisade, which handles custody and treasury automation, powers the managed custody layer that allows companies to provision wallets at scale and transfer funds to operational accounts.
Rail, a virtual accounts and collections platform, allows businesses to accept fiat and stablecoin payments through named virtual accounts with automated conversion and settlement.
The result is that a fintech that makes cross-border payments no longer needs one provider for custody, another for currencies, a third for stablecoin liquidity, and a fourth for local payment methods. Ripple is consolidating all of that into one platform with a single integration.
“For the global financial system to evolve, fintechs and financial institutions need an infrastructure that treats digital assets with the same rigor as traditional finance,” said Monica Long, president of Ripple, in a prepared statement. “Ripple has created the model for blockchain-based enterprise solutions designed to operate on a global scale for regulated finance.”
Meanwhile, Ripple said the platform has now processed more than $100 billion in total volume. That milestone comes against a broader backdrop of accelerating stablecoin adoption across the financial system, with global annual transaction volumes reaching $33 trillion last year and stablecoins now accounting for 30% of all on-chain transaction volume.
The expansion comes at an interesting time specifically for Ripple.
XRP has been under pressure, down about 5% over the past week, according to market data from CoinDesk, amid the widespread market sell-off fueled by the conflict between the United States and Iran.
But the payments business largely operates independently of the token price, and the track record of institutional adoption suggests that Ripple’s business strategy is gaining traction regardless of what the spot market does.
