Ripple’s Client Base Up 50%, c. 7% Use XRP for Cross-Border Liquidity

California-based blockchain startup focusing on payment technologies, Ripple, has seen its client base grow 50% this year, while some 7% use XRP for cross-border liquidity.

“This year has been our strongest for Ripple yet,” Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, said in a recent interview with a Forbes contributor. In their latest announcement, Ripple said that they’ve surpassed 300 customers, compared to 200 in the beginning of 2019. Additionally, Ripple claims, without providing numbers, that it saw a tenfold year-over-year growth in transactions on their payment network, RippleNet.

Also, the company said that it is now has customers using RippleNet in “over 45 countries,” compared to “over 40 countries” in January this year.

Since the startup announced their On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) prodcut last year, in which XRP is used to remove the necessity for pre-funding in cross border payments, they’ve made partnerships with two dozen customers that are now using ODL, says the announcement, such as MoneyGram, goLance, Viamericas, FlashFX and Interbank Peru. This resulted in more than sevenfold increase in transactions using ODL from the end of the first quarter until the end of October, the company said without providing numbers.

ODL initially offered payment corridors in Mexico and the Philippines, afterwards expanding to Australia – for example, major money transfer company MoneyGram, which implemented ODL, sends cross-border payments into Mexico and the Philippines from the U.S. However, Ripple announced its upcoming payment corridor expansion to Brazil, while for 2020 it also plans additional corridors across APAC (Asia-Pacific Countries), EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), and LATAM (Latin America).

In their last quarterly market report, for Q3, Ripple said that “Ripple customers live with ODL, including MoneyGram and others, increased by 75% last quarter and dollar volume on ODL increased more than five times from Q2 to Q3.”

Meanwhile, in an interview with Forbes, Garlinghouse said that they have more than 20 customers using XRP for cross-border liquidity. He also added that Ripple’s got “two dozen customers with millions of dollars of flows per week. This is no longer a science experiment by any stretch.”

He said that there’s been a number of projects building on the XRP ledger, and that even more companies will use XRP with time. “And we even have companies who at one point built on a different blockchain looking to migrate to the XRP ledger because it’s more efficient,” says the CEO.

While some say that Ripple is the “Google of fintech”, Garlinghouse compares it to Amazon, saying that “Amazon’s first go to market was books and Ripple’s first go to market is cross-border payments. We will go after other vertical segments, and we hope to have more to share on that in 2020.”

Recently, Garlinghouse said that Ripple is in talks over “multiple” potential investments and acquisitions and estimated that some 100 new contracts will be signed in 2019. In the January announcement, he stated that “we’re now signing two—sometimes three—new customers per week.”

At the time of writing (9:35 UTC), XRP trades at USD 0.29 and is down by 1.31% in the past 24 hours, but up 1.05% in the past seven days.