Ripple’s Xpring announces investment in Vega Protocol; platform adding XRP as collateral

One of the world’s leading blockchain payment systems, Ripple, has been making a lot of news lately. Ripple’s Xpring initiative today announced investing in Vega Protocol, which is essentially a protocol for creating and trading derivatives on a decentralized network. The official release authored by Xpring’s Director, Vanessa Pestritto, stated,

“Decentralized finance is innovating on market access for trading, lending, making markets and more. The DeFi industry overall has the potential to realize more efficient economics for all participants. It is early days for DeFi and the market for decentralizing infrastructure for new applications and use cases is growing.”

Pestritto revealed that the Brad Garlinghouse-led blockchain firm Ripple’s investment and incubation arm, Xpring, has been developing in the DeFi industry. As Xpring was building its own contingent of an engineering team, the initiative will continue to engage with DeFi teams and communities to support the future of DeFi, including the derivatives industry which is a trillion-dollar market as stated by the Director.

New use-cases for XRP

The Gibraltar-based blockchain platform, Vega Protocol, is designed to work with multiple currencies where assets are collateralized on its host chain [the Vega network], and will add Ripple’s native token, XRP, along with other assets as collateral. According to the blog post, despite the fact that Vega’s first step will be to support integration with Ethereum to allow Ether and ERC20 tokens to be used as collateral, the design will enable the Vega network to interoperate with other assets and networks.

Pestritto further alluded,

“The premise for collateralizing assets to work in an interoperable environment was most appealing as we explore new use cases for XRP and the future of decentralized finance. Vega’s vision to create an open and decentralized network will enable the freedom to trade and make capital markets broadly available.”

Xpring’s Senior Vice President Ethan Beard had previously revealed that they had partnered with or invested in over 20 companies that were using XRP and were aligned with the platform’s vision. Additionally, the SVP also said that Xpring had committed over $500 million to the ecosystem of companies using XRP and technologies like Interledger Protocol [ILP].