The last time the world was on the cusp of a new decade, the Bitcoin Whitepaper was only a few years old, Ripple was yet to be founded and slow cross-border payments were widely accepted as the status quo. As we stand on the doorstep of a new year and a new decade, we reflect on the steps along our company’s journey enabling payments for everyone, everywhere.
Below we list the five most popular Ripple Insights posts of the past year. This analysis tells quite the story of our strongest year of growth to date—and we have a feeling that 2020 will be even better.
5. Ripple Caps Record Year with $200M Series C Funding
The blockchain and digital asset industry continues to mature, shedding businesses that lack product-market fit and rewarding those with real traction. We’re thrilled to cap off our strongest year of growth with this validation from investors in our business and its mission.
The $200 million Series C was led by Tetragon with participation from SBI Holdings and Route 66 Ventures. These notable investors not only underscore our long-term potential, but as partners, they offer invaluable industry insight and expertise to help our business continue to grow on a global scale.
4. RippleNet Growth: Announcing More Than 300 Customers
At our third annual customer conference, Swell, CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced that we surpassed 300 customers. Seeing our customer connections come to life through hundreds of meetings was a clear embodiment of our growing network.
We have also seen 10x year-over-year growth in transactions on RippleNet—our global network of banks, financial institutions and payment providers that enables these companies to send money globally, instantly and reliably for fractions of a penny.
3. Our Open Letter to Congress
2019 saw a year of growth for the industry at large. Projects like the Libra Whitepaper and JPM Coin brought blockchain and crypto to the forefront of policy makers’ and regulators’ minds.
In an open letter to Congress our CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Executive Chairman and Co-founder Chris Larsen urged legislators to support fintech policy that fosters responsible innovation and classifies digital assets in a way that recognizes their fundamental differences—not painting them with a broad brush.
2. Announcing the Next Chapter of Xpring, Ripple’s Developer Platform
In 2018, we established Xpring—the initiative to help scale innovative blockchain projects through partnership and investment. This year, we announced the next evolution of Xpring—now the open developer platform for money.
This new platform offers a set of tools, services and programs that makes it easy for developers to send and receive payments in any currency, across any network using the XRP Ledger and Interledger Protocol. In short, Xpring removes the pain and friction from integrating money into apps.
1. Ripple Announces Strategic Partnership With Money Transfer Giant, MoneyGram
Our most popular Insights blog to date was the announcement of our strategic partnership with MoneyGram (NASDAQ: MGI). Through this partnership, Ripple became MoneyGram’s key partner for cross-border payment and foreign exchange settlement leveraging the digital asset XRP through ODL.
Less than six months later, MoneyGram Chairman and CEO Alex Holmes announced on stage at Swell 2019 that the company currently moves 10% of its transaction volume between the United States and Mexican borders with ODL.
“One of the core strengths of MoneyGram is our global liquidity and settlement engine that enables our customers to send money in over 200 countries and territories. Our partnership with Ripple has helped us to improve this strength and we’ve already started seeing the product’s potential to streamline our back-end capabilities. For the first time ever, we’re settling currencies in seconds,” said Alex Holmes, MoneyGram’s CEO.
