MoneyGram sheds light on Ripple Partnership

Added: January 19, 2021

MoneyGram published a press release on Wednesday December 23rd 2020 approaching the topic of its collaboration with Ripple after news broke out of the SEC instituting a lawsuit against the blockchain firm. According to the press statement, MoneyGram does not use Ripple’s counterparty platform for international payments.

An extract from the press release states:

“MoneyGram has had a commercial agreement with Ripple since June 2019; this agreement represents the use of Ripple’s foreign exchange (FX) blockchain trading platform (ODL) for the purchase or sale of four currencies. MoneyGram has continued to utilize its other traditional FX trading counterparties throughout the term of the agreement with Ripple, and is not dependent on the Ripple platform to accomplish its FX trading needs.”

The explanation from MoneyGram might be surprising because of the fact that Ripple consistently touted the collaboration as evidence to the increasing adoption of its services in the mainstream financial arena. In 2018, some parts of the crypto community stated that Ripple’s impending partnership with MoneyGram was only a pilot test and not a real deployment of RippleNet technology for use by the payments giant.

“Hello, This is a pilot program being tested on internal MoneyGram International processes and is not intended for consumer use.”

— MoneyGram International (@MoneyGram)

Ripple apparently partnered with MoneyGram for cross-border payments back in June 2019. The blockchain firm also completed another equity investment in MoneyGram in November 2019. On the other hand, only a year later, Ripple declared the sale of part of its stake in the payment processor. According to the press release, MoneyGram said to the general public that it does not make use of the Ripple ODL and that it is not a part of the SEC action.

Negative blowback from the SEC enforcement against Ripple carries a negative impact on the XRP price action. XRP has fallen under the $0.30 mark and is selling at 26 cents as of now. The crypto is fourth-ranked by market capitalization and has also followed up its 30 percent decline on December 23rd with an additional 16% decrease during the last 24-hour trading period.

A lot of crypto exchanges have already delisted XRP or are currently in the process of eliminating XRP trading after Coinbase announced that it was considering its options on the matter. Bitwise Asset Management firm has also liquidated its XRP position in the wake of the SEC action.

iGaming, Moneygram, Ripple