Ripple is expanding its engineering team by venturing into a new jurisdiction after acquiring Iceland-based crypto trading firm Algrim. Ripple will get six new engineers from the Algrim team with a focus on integrations with partner crypto exchanges.
This team will work on expanding the company’s cross-border payment corridors and contribute to the ongoing development of the company’s on-demand liquidity product according to Ripple’s vice president of products Amir Sarhangi. The financial terms of Ripple’s acquisition of Algrim were not disclosed. According to Amir Sarhangi, the acquisition is all about expertise.
“It’s about expertise,” Sarhangi said. “This team hits the ground running as opposed to building out a team that has to gain this knowledge.”
The acquisition of Algrim by Ripple marks Ripple’s first expansion into Iceland having made forays into other regions like South America, Australia, and MENA. The company has a physical presence in New York, San Francisco, Mumbai, Sydney, Sao Paulo, and London. According to Sarhangi, the different forays into new territories is to new Ripple expand its ability to hire engineering talent as it moves into new parts of the world.
Ripple’s message has been heard and accepted largely among financial institutions. Its xRapid cross-border payment service allows companies to transfer funds from one currency to XRP and from XRP to another currency. This allows enterprises to not have to open bank accounts in the countries they want to send payments to. This saves them the drag of funds being held there for cross-border transactions. According to Ripple, there are more than a dozen major customers using XRP for Cross-border transactions.
Before the acquisition, Algrim had made a crypto trading platform that it had integrated with more than 30 markets. Before that, the team had been creating traditional trading platforms and foreign exchange trading platforms for more than a decade. Algrim is Ripple’s second acquisition in less than a week after the firm’s investment arm Xpring, acquired payments network builder, Logos. The acquisition of Logos added nine engineers to the Xpring team with the goal being to build XRP-related decentralized finance (Defi) products.
