Ripple Gets a New Customer – the National Commercial Bank, Saudi Arabia
The National Commercial Bank (NCB) of Saudi Arabia has joined hands with Ripple, as per a recent announcement ​by the company on its official blog Ripple.com. Team Ripple posted on the 13th of September that NCB would soon be leveraging the services of RippleNet. NCB is the first bank of Saudi Arabia and currently, one of the largest financial institutes in the entire Middle East region. It provides services to over 5.4 million customers from around the world with more than 400 branches in Saudi Arabia alone. Now, the blockchain technology of RippleNet will enable NCB to offer a more transparent financial ecosystem with faster transactions and international payment services.
By using the RippleNet platform, NCB aims to connect with other financial institutions worldwide. In the first phase, the bank will connect to banking and financial institutions in Singapore, followed by networking in rest of the Asia and North America. NCB has not served customers in these two regions before, and this will be an important addition to their existing user base. “Their [National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia] decision to join RippleNet is an innovative step forward in blockchain adoption in both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East,” stated the company’s announcement. “As more banks in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East connect to RippleNet, their customers — real people and families across the world — will ultimately benefit, ” it further added as per crypto updates. NCB is expected to be live on RippleNet by the end of the fourth quarter of 2018. The company also believes that this step will help SMEs as well as larger corporations associated with NCB to grow and expand their businesses by offering “more efficient and transparent remittances.” This move by the two organizations is a part of the agreement that the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, the country’s central bank, singed with Ripple for assisting banks in the region to enhance their services and infrastructure.
Ethereum Experiences a Slump with a 16-Month Low
The crypto market experienced a slump on Wednesday, the 12th of September with Ethereum (ETH) crashing down to the greatest low in the past 16 months and Bitcoin (BTC) suffering a loss of 2.5 percent in its value. The digital token ETH witnessed a fall of more than 8% in its value on Wednesday morning. The price dropped to $169.12 at around 9:30 am GMT. This was the first time that the prices crashed to this level after the low of May 2017 following a period of surge. The slump has been rather more pronounced if you consider the entire week, with a fall of over 30 percent. This follows a day after the Wall Street regulators announced a series of actions against crypto updates based firms for their failure to adhere with regulations for securities. Such steps by the regulators like SEC tend to pave the way for costly and possibly biased rulings within the crypto sector.
An analyst with eToro and a follower with of the crypto market Mati Greenspan said, “I think Vitalik comments the other day probably had something to do with this. He said the days of 1,000X growth are probably over. The fact that he’s less bullish on the price movement could cause some people to be selling off a bit. And discussions as to how to scale the network are ongoing, ” as reported by Business Insider. In the same light, CEO and founder of CryptoCompare.com Charles Hayter shared that this is just a continuation of the trend that ICOs are following by selling the raised funds and consequently piling on the downward pressure. “This has spooked the market and turned the dial up on the negative sentiment, ” he added. Unlike the rest of the top performing digital tokens, Dogecoin is the only one not in red. It is currently trading at the 18th position as per data available on Coinmarketcap.