The CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse says that the company’s new partnership with money transfer behemoth MoneyGram is its next step in bringing around the adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain. In return, MoneyGram will be utilising Ripple’s xRapid system in order to settle cross-border payments via XRP. This is all posted in a press release published yesterday (June 17th). Speaking to Bloomberg, Garlinghouse said the partnership would assist Ripple in transforming the cross-border payments sector. He stated: “The deal is a big step for Ripple, but I think it’s even a bigger step for the overall industry. There’s been a lot of excitement around what blockchain and digital assets and crypto can mean for the industry and I think it’s the reason why players Facebook are diving in also. But we haven’t yet seen much beyond experimentation. And at Ripple, I think we are the market leader because we have matured aggressively and we’re really solving real problems for real customers. MoneyGram is just the manifestation of that. And as the second largest global remittance company, we’re able to have a big impact with one customer and one partner in this.” The firm is growing at a rapid (pardon the pun) rate and is focused on growing the xRapid platform and expanding the number of payment routes available on the platform. “…with this new product around liquidity, we’re now enabling liquidity into the Mexican peso and the Philippine peso. We certainly expect to be much broader than that, but we’ve only been live with this product for about six or seven months. So we feel like we’ve made tremendous progress in a short amount of time. We’re going to continue to invest with the customers we have today as well as expand the number of corridors we have globally.” Libra Speaking on Facebook’s entrance into crypto, the CEO said: “I think it’s an incredibly positive signal for the overall blockchain and crypto market to have a player like Facebook leaning in. I think there’s been obviously a lot of skepticism in the origins of crypto, coming from kind of an anti-government and anti-bank point of view. [But] to see major industry players lean in and participate I think is really positive for the overall market.” He continues: “Facebook is obviously a consumer-oriented company. Instagram, WhatsApp. What Ripple is doing is really enterprise infrastructure and interconnecting various payment networks around the world. So we’re working with some of the biggest banks around the world, small payment providers and really providing that interoperability between the different networks as opposed to solving within a network kind of problem. So it’s really very different than what I expect they’re going to be doing.”