• People walk outside of Ria Money Transfer office in Brussels, Belgium on Nov. 10, 2018 (via Shutterstock).
    Technology

    Blockchain must solve last-mile problem to dominate remittance business

    Sending money to relatives in developing countries is growing into a half-trillion-dollar business

    Blockchain-based money transfer services can dominate the international remittance business as it grows into a half-trillion-dollar industry over the next five years. That is the result of a study released Monday by Juniper Research, predicting blockchain technology will revolutionize money transfer if it can solve it’s “last-mile” problem—getting cash to recipients in low and middle-income countries. Those countries currently account for $332 billion in money transfers, much of it sent through traditional firms like Western Union and MoneyGram to unbanked people in third world countries, Juniper said. That will grow to $525 billion by 2024. (The World Bank said that number was much higher, reaching $528 billion in 2018.) According…

  • TOP GUN: Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse at an 80s themed holiday party. (Modern Consensus)
    Cryptocurrencies,  Innovators,  Ripple,  XRP

    Ripple’s xRapid ‘Goes Live’ at SWELL

    Four partners confirmed as superfans delight over prospects for XRP

    The idea of transferring value from one place to another was forever changed by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, which led to the introduction of distributed ledger technology (DLT), or blockchain, and the first ever Bitcoin. Originally intended to be used outside the purview of banks—notably in the case of Bitcoin—Ripple has instead embraced the idea that banks and other financial institutions provide one of the largest potential use-cases for DLT. Ripple’s vision has been to “rewire the global financial infrastructure to dramatically improve the costs, speed, and certainty of how transactions flow,” according to CEO Brad Garlinghouse in a video published by Ripple in March of 2018. Garlinghouse…