Ripple teams up with Santander Group

Despite the horrible year XRP had so far, the future could look bright for Ripple, as they’ve just landed one of their biggest clients yet. Alongside Santander Group, they’ve announced a mobile app, based on the company’s distributed ledger.

According to CoinDesk, for the past 18 months, Santander Group had been piloting the app with employees and integrated Apple Pay for payments between $14 and $14,000. The new variant of the app, with Ripple support, will initially be available in Spain, Brazil, Poland, and the United Kingdom.

Same-day payments? Obviously!

Users will be able to use it in order to make same-day cross-border payments in less than a minute, according to a presentation released by the bank. It will also include a digital wallet, as well as a personal finance managed and help aid person-to-person payments.

One of Santander spokespersons said that they are planning to “we plan to launch this in the next few months, and we can confirm on the record that we plan to use xCurrent in the project.” As a side note, Ripple’s xCurrent product doesn’t use XRP, which is the company’s native technology.

The initial announcement regarding this move was made by Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, on Twitter, as he also noted that the app will be released somewhere in the first quarter of the year.

Ripple is still holding to top 3

In other news, Ripple managed to spend around $84 million worth of XRP from its almost $1 billion January reserve in the first time of the month, according to the current prices on the market. As for the remaining amount of $900 million, everything went back into escrow by the end of January.

The funds were transferred using two transactions, as the total amount of 900 million XRP had a total value of $756 million at that moment. Currently, the company has more than 61 billion XRP, with a value of $51 billion, everything being locked up in escrow for the next four years, through smart contracts.