Good news keep arriving regarding Ripple’s XRP adoption outside the financial system. Travala.com will be accepting the XRP cryptocurrency as a means of payment for its services which is quite exciting.
Ripple’s initial and new objectives
Let’s start at the beginning. Very few (if any at all) blockchain projects have ever had the focus Ripple has shown. In the past, Ripple didn’t want for XRP to become a retail currency or means of payment or wealth storage for end-users like you and me.
What Ripple has wanted from the beginning is to use its blockchain technology and its digital currency to get rid of all the friction prevalent in settling international payments using the ironically named SWIFT system. In other words: what Ripple wanted was for banks and remittance services to adopt its technology and currency.
Lately, however, Ripple has changed its tune a little. It’s still going mainly after the international money transfers market, but the company’s leadership has seen the writing in the wall, and it’s been working hard to diversify its use cases to create more demand for the token thus supporting the currency’s price.
Also, Ripple has competition now that it didn’t have a few years ago. Both Stellar Lumens (XLM) and Cardano (ADA) are looking to enter that same market. Moreover, Stellar has IBM’s support which is nothing to sneer at.
So now, Ripple’s XRP is accepted in thousands of online platforms and businesses as means of payment, and there are even debit cards that allow you to fund your card with XRP coins and spend them in the street as if the card was funded with your local fiat currency. The latest example of this hails from Madrid, Spain and it’s called 2gether. It supports seven different digital assets (XRP included) in a Visa debit card that you can use in any business that accepts Visa.
Ripple and Travala
The latest XRP adopter is a next-generation online travel agency (NOTA) called Travala (travala.com). The platform was launched in 2017, and it aims to revolutionize the industry by offering an easy to use booking platform that integrates decentralized technologies and tokenized incentive structures. In this regard, Travala is a champion of the blockchain technology advance into the mainstream.
The platform accepts more traditional means of payment, such as Paypal (which is still fintech, so no that traditional) as well as several cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Nano, Tronix, and BNB among others.
At Travala you can book hotels and save up to 40% in fees. You can choose from 32,311 destinations in 210 countries all around the globe. Paris alone has 2,603 options you can use through this website. And it’s entirely based in blockchain technology.
As we write this, XRP is trading at USD 0.31289, in slightly red numbers (1.78%). It’s still the world’s third cryptocurrency by market capitalization at almost USD 13 billion.
So the token’s price remains a bit too low, but this is the token that’s outperformed every other asset in the cryptoverse for two years in a row. And as it keeps getting adopted by new customers and partners, the price can only go up in the long run.
Remember fundamentals will end up dominating the market sooner or later. XRP is already isolated (up to a point) from the mess the cryptocurrency market has been during the last 15 months because it’s one of the coins with the most utility in the real world.
Image courtesy of PixaBay.
Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.