Launched in 2018, DeeMoney provides same-day settlement services for Thai bank accounts. The company turned to RippleNet to increase the efficiency of transactions coming into the country, said CEO Aswin Phlaphongphanich.
A Bangkok-based remittance platform has become the first non-banking institution in Thailand to use Ripple’s blockchain tech to process international payments.
Ripple said Wednesday DeeMoney is now using RippleNet to process transactions in a move aimed to cut costs.
«Ripple’s technology provides a single, automated system that speaks the same way to all its 300 partners worldwide, making it simple for our tech teams to integrate into our process,» he said. «This helps to reduce manual work and intervention, which in turn reduces costs, of which the savings are passed to our customers.»
Thailand is a hub for settlement and remittance services. The Bank of Thailand estimates that more than a million Thais work overseas, many of whom continue to send money back to their families.
Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), Thailand’s largest commercial bank, first started testing a RippleNet-based cross-border remittance solution in 2018. The collaboration developed and SCB has added additional settlement services, including one based on a mobile app.
RippleNet is a 300-plus network of banks and financial institutions that use Ripple’s blockchain for cross-border settlements and remittances. One of several products under its umbrella – called On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) – lets firms use the XRP cryptocurrency to avoid having to tie up large amounts of fiat currency. It’s not clear if DeeMoney is using that particular service.
Ripple famously invested in MoneyGram last year, with the money-sending giant now using various Ripple products including XRP via ODL.
DeeMoney said it plans to add support for transactions going out of Thailand, too, although a timeframe for that integration was not disclosed.
Third-Party Cryptos Could Launch on XRP Ledger, Says Ripple’s David Schwartz
Ripple is developing a feature that could allow users to mint asset-backed tokens directly on top of XRP Ledger, the firm’s tech chief has said.In a company video released Thursday, Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz said Ripple is working on «exciting» new features to broaden the ledger’s functionality and allow third-party users to introduce other cryptocurrencies into the XRP ecosystem.
Although Schwartz did not go into detail on what exactly the new features are, he did say they could be used for launching fixed-value tokens on XRP Ledger. «Stablecoins is the obvious use case, but it’s not just stablecoins it’s essentially assets pegged to some external value,» he said.
Similar features exist on other blockchains, most notably Tether, which runs stablecoin layers on multiple networks simultaneously. But Schwartz said asset-backed tokens on XRP would have «guaranteed» liquidity because of the ledger’s mechanics.
Schwartz previously outlined how a fully collateralized XRP stablecoin could be liquid on his Youtube channel last October. Rather than creating separate markets for each and every digital asset, trades take place in XRP so the stablecoin remains liquid irrespective of its popularity, he explained.
This wouldn’t be the first time Ripple has made forays outside of its core settlement business. The company’s investment arm, Xpring, acquired decentralized payments platform Logos Network in September. At the time Xpring’s senior vice president told CoinDesk the acquisition would help Ripple create financial products on XRP Ledger.
During Thursday’s video, Schwartz said Ripple had explored additional use cases before, further suggesting the ledger already has some un-utilized functionalities built into it.
In the «early days,» Schwartz said, the engineering team «started to realize the properties of the algorithms we’d developed allowed us to do things, like a decentralized exchange.»
These had already been put into «a functional system» sometime in mid-2012 and included a feature allowing users to issue their own digital assets, he said.
