By design, Ripple’s XRP is considered the best well-established cryptocurrency for banking institutions, especially for cross border remittance services. However, despite high compliance levels and well-developed new financial products by Ripple, banks have remained rigid to XRP.
By 2020, early ripple investors’ expected XRP to have massive adoption and increase exponentially in value, but the reality is different.
Not only is XRP being bypassed by new institutional investors into the crypto market, but banks are also seemingly unprepared or unwilling to incorporate XRP as a bridging service.
According to Ripple’s CTO David Schwartz, Ripple’s disappointing adoption rate is due to a number of discernible obstacles. He pointed this out during an exchange with the Ripple community citing the low forecasted performance of XRP in 2021.
“I think there are a combination of obstacles. Regulatory uncertainty, last-mile problems, fear of reprisals from existing partners.”
XRP Facing Low Product Adoption Momentum
Apart from the unfriendly crypto regulatory framework and especially in the US, Schwartz said that the best of Ripple customers are waiting for more banks to bring in remittance customers.
“Another big thing is the very best customers are ones that are going to use bridge assets to build new products. They are heavily motivated to see projects to completion and will push the benefits all the way down to customers.”
However, due to low adoption as banks prefer to use more familiar and well known traditional remittance services, complete products on Ripple will continue to have less traffic.
“Even when they’re 100% ready to go, they still have 0 customers because the product is new. So it’s slow to get the momentum.”
Additionally, Schwartz stated a high dependence of XRP- as a new product- on banks’ willingness to adopt cryptocurrencies.
But with Ripple’s plan to exit the US Market for friendlier crypto regulatory jurisdictions in Europe or Asia, Schwartz added that XRP might not have to wait until more banks express their interest in utilizing cryptocurrencies.
“We were going to sit around to wait for banks to adopt digital assets on their own initiative.”
XRP Left Out By PayPal
The fourth cryptocurrency by market cap has also had a rough year, following a 27% YTD performance and an 18.6% drop on the year.
It has also been left out of last week’s price rally of major digital assets after Paypal excluded it from its crypto assets offering announcement. Â
