Ripple Teams With Uphold to Bolster Cross-Border Payments Infrastructure

Blockchain company Ripple has launched a partnership with Web3 financial platform Uphold.

With the partnership, announced Tuesday (Oct. 24), Uphold has agreed to provide Ripple with “enhanced crypto liquidity capabilities” to support and improve its cross-border payments infrastructure, the companies said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.

In addition, “Uphold’s deep liquidity expertise further underpins Ripple’s ability to offer fast and flexible cross-border payments around the world,” said Pegah Soltani, Ripple’s head of payments product.

The release says Uphold’s trading architecture makes it easy to move value between fiat and crypto and across networks, while also offering access from a range of crypto liquidity venues globally, thus letting businesses serve customers and deliver payments.

“Ripple provides a tremendously valuable service to businesses making cross-border payments and we are thrilled to be an essential part of it,” said Uphold CEO Simon McLoughlin.

“Our partnership with Ripple illustrates how the unique capabilities of our platform can be used by enterprises to make efficient crypto-to-fiat transfers and bank payouts.”

PYMNTS spoke earlier this month with Pat Thelen, vice president of global account management at Ripple, about the way new blockchain-led innovations are enhancing the capabilities of the payments industry.

“We see the tokenization of real-world assets as about as exciting as anything out there,” Thelen said. “If you apply the technology to industries that have been around forever and are fraught with manual processes and illiquidity and latency, there are some real opportunities where so much cost can be taken out of the equation. You can get pretty clever as these use cases unfold.”

The news of Ripple and Uphold’s partnership comes five days after Ripple scored a new victory in its 3-year-old battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The SEC said in a court filing last week that it would dismiss its claims that Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Executive Chairman Chris Larsen aided and abetted the company’s alleged securities law violations.

The SEC took action against Ripple and its executives in 2020, accusing the company of carrying out a $1.3 billion unregistered securities offering tied to its XRP token.

Ripple had previously won a court victory when the judge in the SEC case ruled that the company had not broken securities laws when it made XRP available to retail investors. Earlier this month, the SEC lost its appeal of that ruling.