Japanse financial giant SBI on Wednesday announced an XRP incentive program for its shareholders.
According to the Tokyo-headquartered company, shareholders with 100 or more units of SBI Holdings shares are entitled to receive 30 XRP tokens, irrespective of the number of their shareholdings. It also detailed that the shareholders with the specific holdings before September 30 will be eligible for the incentives.
To receive the incentives, eligible shareholders need to open a free account on the conglomerate’s virtual currency Exchange SBI VC until March 31, 2020. The accounts will then be credited automatically by the company with the specified digital currency.
“We decided to increase the interim dividend, and at the same time, decided to present the virtual currency XRP as an intermediary shareholder benefit program,” the official announcement stated.
The company also mentioned that it would send detailed emails to all shareholders about the program.
A clever way to make XRP mainstream
SBI Holdings also operates a subsidiary with Ripple in Japan called SBI Ripple Asia. Formed in 2018, the joint venture runs a Payments app called MoneyTap to provide real-time bank-to-bank money transfers in the country using Ripple’s xCurrent solution.
Ripple’s XRP is the third-largest digital currency in the market with a market cap of $10.8 billion. In the last 24 hours, the digital currency shed 8.2 percent of its value and, as of press time, is trading at $0.25 apiece, as seen on Coinmarketcap.com.
Unlike other publicly available digital currencies, XRP is very centralized, and Ripple itself controls its circulation. The currency is designed to ease the inefficient remittance transfers by the banks. The company has already partnered with hundreds of banks worldwide and working on the technology hand-in-hand with them.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Ripple is facing severe backlash from the regulators for arguments of qualifying as security.
