Ripple India CBDC XRP Take-Over. The Truth and Speculation

Grab a coffee and get ready for this one folks. It will be a very long and detailed article about a bombshell thread that was crafted by a daily active member of the XRP community @Cryptoinsightuk. Ripple, for quite a long time, has been looking to takeover (metaphorically speaking) a country that has a 1.39B population count, as well as being one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

Keep in mind this will be a lot of speculation, however at the same time will contain man set-in-stone facts about key Ripple partnerships and how in a way, they sort of connect with each other depending on the way you look at it.

Some time ago, in 2018, Ripple’s Asheesh Birla made it publicly known that they had some very aggressive marketing ideas about how to capture majority of the India cross-border payment market share. One of those being a true gamble of just giving every single person in India some XRP, to promote the usage of the XRPL’s native token.

“So let’s start with something a lot of you may not know.. One of Ripple original ideas regarding the distribution of #XRP was to give it away to every person in India. They didn’t follow through with this idea, but it shows the importance of this market to the team at Ripple:”

Here are two key statements from the Ripple executive.

“Their next thoughts, again from Asheesh Birla. Go after the top 3 commercial banks in India and you get 80% market share (xRapid is now ODL). They then looked at mobile banking and exclaimed in 2018 that in their pipeline they “probably have 50% of the Indian market”

“So this leads to the question, what did they achieve? Well, they seem to have signed a deal with the Federal Bank of India for a ‘new cross boarder payment system’ Reserve Bank of India has 671 branches and 681 ATMs:”

“Next up we have Axis bank. Axis Bank is the third largest private sector bank in India. Axis Bank covers Large and Mid-Corporates, SME, Agriculture and Retail Businesses. With its 3,485 domestic branches and 14,332 ATMs across the country:”

“Next we have Kotak Mahindra Bank: A leading bank in India with over 1300 branches. Kotak will use xCurrent to power instant remittance payments (xCurrent at the time doens’t leverage #XRP but this is from 2018).” (source)

“Now we have addressed Ripple’s goals with domestic banks, I think it’s time we move on to speculate about their Central Bank and a CBDC coming out of India (this financial year). Why / How may Ripple and the #XRPL be involved? This is where we get speculative, but bare with me.”

“They are now looking for Staff Partner Engineer’s, Compliance/ Risk Managers and Central Bank Partner solution Directors. They had some very interesting positions open at Ripple in India back in early June (must now have been filled – Excuse the quality).”

“Ripple also wrote a document suggesting safe and innovative ways to regulate Crypto in India. And let’s not forget, Ripple have their own CBDC whitepaper and help countries run trials on a private CBDC ledger within the XRPL -“ (source)

We can assume it’s safe to say that most of our readers remember Ripple’s big partnership announcement with Bhutan’s central bank, the Royal Monetary Authority. The announcement consisted of not only a partnership, but moreover a pilot for a Ripple powered (XRP?) CBDC using a private ledger. This is where things really start to get interesting in this thread.

“My last and most interesting part of this speculation is the open announcement of Ripple’s partnership with the country of Bhutan. Bhutan’s currency the ‘Ngultrum’ is actually tied 1-1 to the Rupee (National currency of India, is also accepted in Bhutan).”

“This becomes even more interesting when we realize Bhutan exports are about 90% to India and their imports are around 70%. So, the question is then, how will a digital Ngultrum effect the India Bhutan payment flow?”

“One final thought is timing. When? Well, as quoted above, India is testing their Digital Currency as we speak and are looking to potentially roll out by the end of this financial year. This looks similar to Bhutan, who have suggested roll out will happen by 2023;”

All credit is given to @Cryptoinsightuk, make sure to check out their socials, and engage with the original thread on twitter.