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In August, CoinGeek reported that Ripple’s business plan to work closely with banks and act as their cross-border payments pipeline didn’t seem to be working very well. Spanish bank Santander announced that it would no longer use XRP due to its low trading volume. Its strategic partnership with MoneyGram has failed to pay off its budget.
“Ripple simply doesn’t offer anything of value,” said Dr. Craig S. Wright. “It is not an efficient settlement system; it does not eliminate or mitigate the need for money laundering controls and all other controls that banks have. It’s a technology they are trying to bring into an industry they don’t understand. “
Now, Ripple’s leaders are taking action to create a pivot in the hopes of being more useful to the business community. The pivot is happening over the course of its lengthy battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over whether the XRP digital currency is a security and a potential relocation of its headquarters outside of the United States.
CoinDesk recently reported that the San Francisco-based company obtained a patent (# 10,789,068) on September 29, 2020 from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The patent is for a design capable of executing smart contracts based on data collected from the outside world.
The USPTO record attributes the patent to former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz, the co-creator of the Interledger protocol.
The smart contract uses oracles to connect a distributed platform to a mixture of different real-world data sources. An example of its potential application is the use of smart contracts to automatically settle option contracts when pre-agreed conditions are met, such as a company’s debt-to-equity ratio meeting a certain threshold.
The Ripple patent notes that the systems offered can also be used for “transfer of value”. The transaction can include tangible or intangible assets if they meet the conditions of the smart contract.
Ripple hasn’t released a statement on how they intend to use this newly awarded patent. Perhaps it will be incorporated along the way into Ripple’s new credit line solution that they announced last Friday as it branches out into the lending industry.
Either way, Ripple’s previous ambitions as a means of transfer for financial institutions now appear to be firmly in the company’s rearview mirror. Its future remains cloudy as it continues to search for a profitable and sustainable business as it battles US regulators.
See the CoinGeek Live, Smart Contracts & Tokens panel on Bitcoin SV: Going Mainstream
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