Key Takeaways:
- Ripple signed a new partnership with the trading platform Uphold.
- XRP price couldn’t care less.
- Cross-border payment partnerships have an erratic influence on XRP.
YEREVAN (CoinChapter.com) — On Oct. 24, Ripple Labs partnered with trading platform Uphold to bolster its cross-border crypto payments infrastructure.
Ripple Partnership Fails to Impress XRP Bulls
As of Q3, 2023, Uphold has customers across over 184 countries and conducts transactions in over 200 currencies (fiat and crypto). According to Ripple, the partnership will provide the company with “enhanced crypto liquidity capabilities.”
Meanwhile, the XRP coin was quite unimpressed with the new partner and slid 2% to $0.55 on Oct. 25.
XRP’s price action begs the question: Do Ripple’s multiple “payout” partnerships, i.e., firms that make cross-border payments possible, actually boost the organic demand for the coin?
Ripple Payout Partners
Ripple has six partner companies (minus Uphold) listed on their website as cross-border payment partners.
- Nium was one of the first to join forces with Ripple in February 2018. The company is using Ripple’s XRP-powered cross-border payments platform, On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), to settle transactions from the US dollar to the Mexican peso.
- Trading platform Bitso jumped on the wagon in November 2019. The main goal of the partnership was to provide infrastructure for sending remittances with reduced transaction costs.
- Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) partnered with Ripple in April 2020. Following approval to exit the Bank of Thailand (BoT) sandbox, SCB, together with Ripple, launched “Outward Remittance Service via SCB EASY” to its retail customers across Thailand and 11 other countries.
- In February 2022, Ripple signed an agreement with payments platform Modulr to “enable seamless payments into the UK and Europe.”
- Asian cross-border payment company Tranglo came next in March 2022, helping Ripple extend into the Middle East and the United Arab Emirates in particular.
Partnerships’ Influence on XRP Price is Erratic
Let’s take a look at how those alliances affected XRP in the month following the partnership. As the chart below demonstrates, the results are quite erratic. Naturally, there are many factors affecting an asset price at any given time. However, the partnerships do not build a clear pattern.
In the month following four out of six partnerships, XRP price grew in the range of 25-40%. However, in two out of six cases, the price dropped by 17-30%. As the influence of those events is quite erratic, there is no base to predict an upcoming trend continuation or reversal in the future.
XRP price could be much more influenced by Bitcoin value, the ongoing lawsuit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and the overall climate on the cryptocurrency market.
