San Francisco-based digital wallet provider Uphold on Wednesday announced the integration of Ripple-issued XRP on its platform.
XRP now joins the group of more than 30 fiat and digital currencies, which are already listed on the platform. The list includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and a range of other coins.
The decision of listing XRP on Uphold follows the investment of $57.5 million on the platform by former Ripple Chief Risk Officer Greg Kidd in January. Uphold’s acquisition of the mobile commerce platform Cortex MCP in February also boosted the process.
In the official announcement, CEO of Uphold, Adrian Steckel, said: “there has been huge demand for XRP and Uphold is one of the first platforms to make XRP easily accessible. Uphold was first with Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold, and we are again responding to interest from our members in establishing a first with XRP.”
Moreover, Uphold is offering zero fee trade orders for early investors and will levy a fee after the purchase of the first 5 million XRP on the platform. This move might give the platform an edge over its competitors as we have seen in the case of crypto Trading Platform Robinhood.
The announcement further mentioned that the decision of the addition of XRP was based on the users' demand as in a Twitter poll earlier this month, 51 percent of more than 12,000 participants voted for Ripple over coins like Monero, Stellar, and Cardano.
Uphold was also working on the integration of XRP for a month as Coindesk quoted the platform's Vice Chairman J.P. Thieriot: “generally we have to find counterparties we can trade with, given our system, [since] we don't have an internal order book. We have to create an integration with a third party. In the case of XRP, it's an entirely new Blockchain - it's not like adding an ERC-20 token, which is relatively trivial for us.”
Uphold is also working to integrate Ripple’s mainnet on the platform to enable direct deposits and withdrawals in a few weeks.
“The XRP ecosystem is diversifying and growing rapidly. The listing of XRP on Uphold, a strong retail platform that offers customers easy access to digital assets, underscores the significant increase in demand for XRP," Miguel Vias, Head of XRP markets at Ripple, said.
