On July 2nd, Ripple outlined the firm’s plans for future funding through its investments arm, Xpring. The company hopes to expand the use cases for its blockchain based token XRP by supporting developers and focusing on transforming the financial sector. It also revealed that $500 million has been invested to date.
Xpring was founded a year ago to create the Internet of Value (IoV). Akin to the Internet of Things (IoT), Ripple defines the IoV as the new way of exchanging assets from instantly transferring funds with cryptocurrency to trading intellectual property safely. The key characteristic of the IoV is the lack of a middleman, enabled by blockchain technology.
Ripple’s Ethan Beard, a co-founder of Xpring, wrote in Tuesday’s blog post: “Our efforts have expanded to focus on two areas: build the best crypto infrastructure through contributions to open source crypto protocols such as the XRP Ledger and Interledger projects; and help innovative blockchain projects grow through partnership and investment.”
In the last year, Xpring has funded over 20 firms with a total of $500 million, including a $100 million investment in the gaming industry. Tuesday’s announcement details some of Xpring’s ongoing initiatives.
Bolt Labs has been funded by Ripple to develop its payment network, which supports many cryptocurrencies, scaling transactions off-chain. Its aim to do so while maintaining consumer privacy.
Previous investments include Securitize, a platform which focuses on trading securities, Dharma, a peer-to-peer tokenized lending service, Kava, the Interledger Solution provider, and XRPL Labs, an application developer working on various use cases for Ripple’s XRP Ledger, such as a secure signing app.
Apart from the five companies already mentioned, investees are Agoric, Blockchain Capital, Coil, Compound Labs, Forte (games), Omni, raised in space, Robot Ventures and Strata Labs. But that’s only 14 companies. We’ve asked Xpring for the names of the others.
Going forward, Ripple outlines three areas they will continue to leverage with Xpring’s investments. Firstly, to build more tools for XRP Ledger, the distributed ledger on which XRP is traded.
Secondly, the firm wants to continue to work in interoperability between systems. Ripple’s Interledger Protocol is in use for converting assets such as in-game tokens to XRP. The Hyperleder Quilt project is a java version of Interledger.
Finally, in line with the IoV, Ripple plans to further invest in decentralizing the finance sector. Xpring’s funds will aim at using blockchain for debt, derivatives, and stablecoins amongst other areas.
“Simply put, we want to work with developers and entrepreneurs who are building towards a shared vision to reshape the world’s financial systems and enable the Internet of Value,” wrote Beard.
