28.03.2024

Ripple Hires Congressional Assistant as Government Relations Manager

On Sept. 3, Ron Hammond took to Twitter to announce that as of today, he is the new Manager of Government Relations for Ripple.

Ron Hammond took to Twitter today to confirm to the XRP community that he is the new manager of government relations for Ripple.

Hammond was reportedly part of the team that crafted the Token Taxonomy Act, a bill that would exclude cryptocurrencies from classification as securities, as well as provide the introduction of regulatory certainty for businesses and regulators in the U.S. blockchain industry.

Token Taxonomy Act

Writing about the new hire, the XRP Daily said:

“Ripple works with more than 50 governments around the world and now somebody from the U.S. Government is managing the government relations at Ripple, which is awesome. Glad to see Ron Hammond join the team and help build the internet of value.”

XRP community takeover

As Cointelegraph reported on Aug. 28, the XRP community has been threatening a takeover i.e. a hard fork if Ripple executives keep on dumping XRP.

Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple chief executive, felt the need to diffuse the situation and responded promptly by saying:

“XRP sales are about helping expand XRP’s utility – building RippleNet supporting other biz building w/XRP ie Dharma Forte. Reality is we DECREASED our sales by volume Q/Q and since then the inflation rate of XRP circulating supply has been lower than that of BTC and ETH.”

Ripple Expands Into Iceland With Acquisition of Crypto Trading Firm

Ripple is expanding its engineering team and moving into a new geography with the acquisition of Iceland-based crypto trading firm Algrim.

The Algrim team will add six engineers to Ripple’s ranks, with a focus on integrations with partner crypto exchanges. The team will work to expand Ripple’s cross-border payment corridors and contribute to the ongoing development of the company’s on-demand liquidity product, said Amir Sarhangi, Ripple’s vice president of products. Ripple did not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.

“It’s about expertise”, Sarhangi said. “This team hits the ground running as opposed to building out a team that has to gain this knowledge.”

The purchase is also the company’s first expansion into Iceland. Ripple has a physical presence in San Francisco, New York, London, Mumbai, Singapore, São Paulo and Sydney. The company wants to expand its ability to hire engineering talent as it moves into new parts of the world, Sarhangi added.

On-demand liquidity through Ripple’s xRapid cross-border payment service allows companies to transfer funds from one currency to XRP and from XRP to another currency. This allows enterprises to avoid opening a bank account in countries they want to send payments to, letting them avoid holding funds there for cross-border transactions. Ripple says it has more than a dozen customers using XRP for cross-border transactions.

Prior to the acquisition, Algrim developed a crypto trading platform that the firm integrated with more than 30 markets. Before that, the team built traditional trading platforms and foreign exchange trading algorithms for more than a decade. The firm was reportedly among the victims in Iceland’s “Big Bitcoin Heist” of late-2017.

The news follows Ripple’s announcement on Friday that its investment arm, Xpring, had purchased Logos Network. That move brought nine engineers to the Xpring team with the goal of building XRP-related decentralized finance (DeFi) products. Before joining Xpring, Logos was working to build a payments network inspired by the bitcoin blockchain, with a focus on a scalable, rapid network that still maintains high levels of security.

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