Visa Inc., a credit card giant, is to acquire UK payments firm Earthport Plc. for $250.6 million. Visa International Service Association, a unit of Visa offered 30 pence for each share of Earthport, which is exactly four times the closing price 7.45 pence on Monday. Earthport facilitates cross-border payment services to businesses and banks. Ripple, the blockchain-based payment network has been partners with Earthport, since 2015. Visa was interested in expanding its cross-border payment business, which spiked 10% in 2018.
Visa’s proposal quite “fair and reasonable” so that it would propose the shareholders take up all the cash offer. Ripple, Bank of America, Hyperwallet, Transferwise, Payoneer, and Japan Post Bank are all clients of Earthport. It smoothly runs the cross-border payments using an API (Application program interface) to settle funds with the help of its banking partners.
Earthport launched the world’s first DLH (distributed ledger hub) in January 2016. Using DLH, clients of Earthport can access group’s distributed ledger technology via simple and inexpensive single API. The API enables access to both Ripple ecosystem along with a wide array of payment methods that are offered in more than 200 countries by Earthport.
In November 2018, at least 100 SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) where connected banks have signed with Ripple. Garlinghouse, Ripple CEO undercuts SWIFT’s disagreement that cryptocurrencies and blockchain are not important in the banking sector.“SWIFT said not that long ago they didn’t see blockchain as a solution to correspondent banking. We’ve got well over 100 of their customers saying they disagree.”
That is why Garlinghouse recently donated $50 million U.S. dollars to 17 universities across the globe to boost adoption of the blockchain. Ripple believes interest in the blockchain technology will escalate as the public has started experiencing the potential of distributed ledger technology. Garlinghouse is optimistic towards the future of Ripple, the blockchain, and the cryptocurrency, despite Crypto Winter in 2018.
He also highlighted XRP, ripple’s cryptocurrency is the only virtual currency which has successfully integrated the bank payments systems with its platform. XRP could eventually surpass bitcoin, according to the prediction by Garlinghouse. He repeatedly said that XRP is independent of Ripple and it will continue to trade even if Ripple were to shut down in case.
“It’s very clear XRP is not security…If Ripple the company shut down, XRP trades on a hundred other exchanges around the world and XRP would continue to trade. Ripple is one important participant in the XRP ecosystem, but there are a whole bunch of participants.”