Ripple Gives Away USD 263M in XRP that Lost 27% of its Value this Year

Xpring, Ripple’s investment vehicle, said it made a XRP 1 billion (USD 263 million) grant to the in-browser payment processing startup Coil.

The goal of this grant is two-fold: drive the adoption of XRP and improve Coil’s business model so to enable the creators to monetize their content, according to their press release. Hence, the grant will be used by the startup “to build an ecosystem of creators, developers, companies and nonprofits that are using XRP through the Web Monetization open standard,” as well as to “build awareness of Coil among creators, consumers and strategic partners”.

Stefan Thomas, CEO and founder of Coil, co-creator of the Interledger Protocol, and former Chief Technology Officer of Ripple, says that creators want more choice and control over the monetization and distribution of their content, adding “This initiative will help us level the playing field for creators by providing a better way to support content across the web.”

Ethan Beard, Senior Vice President of Xpring, said that “Advertising and site-by-site subscription models are ready for disruption” and XRP is “an ideal tool to accomplish that due to the low cost and fast transactions.”

Back in May, Coil launched its monetized platform for creators to post exclusive, public content with automatically enabled streaming payments, with no membership fees for creators and a USD 5 monthly subscription for the supporters. “Coil streams XRP micropayments to creators in real time using the Interledger Protocol”, allowing “any currency or asset to be used for sending and receiving payments”, while the creators can choose whether they want to be paid in USD dollars via check, in XRP, or wire transfer. The plan is to have more currency payout options as more wallets adopt the Interledger Protocol.

Meanwhile, just recently, in June, popular image hosting site Imgur announced that it received USD 20 million in venture equity from Coil, which will go towards Imgur “making the internet a more positive place”, while Thomas joined Imgur’s board of directors. In February, it made an investment in a video streaming service Cinnamon, while Xpring participated in Coil’s USD 4 million seed round.

At pixel time (15:31 UTC), XRP trades at c. USD 0.26, down by 10% in the past 24 hours, by 14% in the past week and by 27% this year.

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