Early last year, the state of New York began requiring a license to engage in virtual currency activity. Ripple engaged with New York’s Department of Financial Services and today received a “BitLicense” to sell and custody XRP, the digital asset native to the Ripple Consensus Ledger, for institutional investors and financial institutions in New York.
While previous approvals were for consumer-facing businesses, Ripple’s BitLicense is the first granted for an additional institutional use case for digital assets.
“Earning the BitLicense is incredible validation of the institutional use of digital assets by DFS, one of the most influential state regulators,” said Ripple co-founder and CEO Chris Larsen. “I’m proud of the work of our regulatory relations team, led by Ryan Zagone. With the BitLicense in hand, we look forward to working with our New York bank customers seeking to use XRP for liquidity and cost savings.”
Within Ripple’s Consensus Ledger, XRP is used to improve currency liquidity and lower the capital costs of cross-border payments. Instead of holding local currency in nostro accounts around the world, banks can use the Ripple network to consolidate their liquidity for global payments into one XRP account, held on their own balance sheets.
This singular XRP pool then allows respondent banks to allocate less total capital to service the same volume of international payments. As a result, respondent banks that use Ripple with XRP as a bridge asset can save up to 42 percent on costs today and up to 60 percent as market adoption of XRP grows.