San Francisco-based fintech company Ripple, has given 1 billion XRP tokens to in-bowser payment platform Coil to help the start-up build a community of “creators, consumers and strategic partners”, industry website Coindesk has reported.
The news was announced yesterday by Xpring, Ripple’s investment arm. The 1-billion XRP grant came directly from “Ripple’s balance sheet of XRP”, Xpring’s vice president Ethan Beard told Coindesk. According to an August 15 press release, Xpring also participated in Coil’s $4 million seed round.
The announcement comes a week after Ripple’s chief executive officer Brian Garlinghouse revealed that Ripple was working on a “multiple” potential investments and acquisitions to help accelerate the company’s growth.
“We’re in a very strong position, our business is growing strongly, we have a strong balance sheet, and I intend to press our advantage,” Garlinghouse told Yahoo Finance UK last Friday.
“Anything we can do to accelerate our growth and give us more capabilities that serve customer needs is a good place to be,” he added.
Coil was founded in 2018 by Ripple’s former chief technical officer Stefan Thomas. In May of this year, the start-up launched a platform that enables streaming of XRP micropayments to content creators.
Price slump
The grant from Ripple is worth $260 million at current XRP prices. The cryptocurrency experienced a big sell-off on Wednesday, which led to the coin hitting a 20-month low of $0.252 during that session. The coin has been able to recover only a small portion of its losses in subsequent trading.
In today’s trading, the XRP price stood at $0.260, as of 15:21 BST. The digital currency has lost just over 1% of its value in the past 24 hours, according to data from cryptocurrency tracker Coinmarketcap. The coin’s total market capitalisation currently stands at $11.17 billion.
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