Ripple Uses Singapore’s BLOOM to Test Cross-Border Stablecoin Trades

Ripple is reportedly testing stablecoin-powered trade finance with the help of Singapore’s central bank.

The company told Coindesk Wednesday (March 25) that it is taking part in BLOOM, a Monetary Authority of Singapore program aimed at extending settlement capabilities for tokenized bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins.

The plan involves Ripple working with Unloq, a supply chain finance technology provider, to test a system where cross-border trade payments using Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin are released automatically when certain conditions are met, such as shipment verification, the report added.

Trade finance, Coindesk noted, has traditionally relied on layers of manual verification, documentary credits and correspondent banking relationships that might take days—if not weeks—to settle.

And as covered here recently, this situation has only been made worse by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

“For vessels that would normally call at Gulf ports or transit nearby waters, the calculus now includes the possibility of missile strikes, drone attacks or naval confrontation,” PYMNTS wrote. “For global container logistics, the shift has a cascading effect. When ships alter routes or cancel port calls, the delicate choreography of container repositioning breaks down.”

Ripple and Unloq’s pilot, the Coindesk report added, employs Unloq’s SC+ platform to combine trade obligations, settlement conditions and financing workflows into one execution layer, with RLUSD on the XRP Ledger taking care of money movement.

As PYMNTS wrote last week, stablecoins have essentially been able to build their reputation just on their promise to provide cross-border settlement innovations. At the time, PayPal had just expanded the availability of its dollar-backed stablecoin PayPal USD (PYUSD) and now offers it in 70 markets around the world.

However, stablecoin flows account for an “infinitesimally small” share of cross-border payment volume. Payments coming from Latin America and Africa, two supposed digital asset hot spots, each make up less than $1 billion. Stablecoin payment activity today is fueled almost solely by payments sent from Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, according to McKinsey data.

“Beneath the headline crypto noise, however, a more powerful, real-world transformation has been unfolding,” that report added.

“Traditional payment rails, long criticized for being slow, opaque and expensive, are undergoing a structural upgrade. Three main advances are driving change: real-time rails are expanding globally, FX costs are shrinking and APIs are turning payments into software and streamlining local and multicurrency collections.”