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Ripple valuation rose to $10B after securing $200M of funding

Ripple / Facebook

Ripple’s market valuation just got a major boost after a successful round of funding. Buoyed by the recent capital infusion, the blockchain start-up is now valued at $10 billion.

Ripple successful raised $200 million in the recent fundraising, CNBC reported. The round was led by Tetragon, a New York-based investment firm. Virginia-based Route 66 Ventures as well as Japanese company SBI Holding also participated.

The company was founded in 2012 and saw the value of its cryptocurrency XRP soar during the 2017 crypto market rally. While XRP’s price has declined from its 2017 all-time high, it has already entrenched itself as the third-largest digital currency by market capitalization after Bitcoin and Ethereum based on data from CoinMarketCap.

The $200 million funding shows that investors are confident of XRP’s potential in facilitating cross-border transactions that some are calling it the “blockchain-based alternative to Swift.” The company has been wooing financial institutions to use XRP as a “bridge currency” for cross-border transactions, Fortune reported.

“We are in a strong financial position to execute against our vision,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said. “As others in the blockchain space have slowed their growth or even shut down, we have accelerated our momentum and industry leadership throughout 2019.”

Garlinghouse revealed his optimistic outlook for 2020 and said he expects Ripple’s current customer base of more than 300 to grow between 30 to 40 percent next year. He also expects transaction volume on the network to increase by more than 600 percent.

One of the major advantages of using XRP for cross-border settlements it that companies could free up capital that they would otherwise have placed in banks as reserves. Moneygram is already a Ripple customer and 15 percent of money transfer to Mexico is now done using XRP.

Garlinghouse also noted that people have been using XRP for transfers in other parts of the globe. Large volumes of money transfers in Australia dollars and Philippine pesos are done using XRP and the company is currently testing its use for transfers in Brazilian real.

The company revealed that a large chunk of its income comes from selling some of its massive XRP holdings. Last year, it sold $260 million worth of the cryptocurrency.

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