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San Francisco Firm Launches Cryptocurrency Exchange with XRP as ‘Base Currency’

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Samburaj Das
Last Updated

San Francisco-based marketplace DCEX will become the first cryptocurrency exchange to use XRP as its ‘base currency’, available for both retail and institutional investors.

DCEX will function as a crypto-to-crypto marketplace wherein all digital currencies will be trading against the XRP – the native token powering the Ripple Consensus Ledger (RCL) developed by San Francisco-based Ripple – as the platform’s “base currency”, the exchange operator said in an announcement .

The exchange and trading platform will be powered by industry services firm AlphaPoint, DCEX added. While registrations are currently open for users, the exchange will commence trading at an undetermined time over the coming weeks.

“XRP blockchain transactions typically settle in under four seconds, allowing for faster multi-exchange strategies and providing a speed advantage over other money movement options,” read an excerpt from the announcement, explaining the operator’s marked choice to use XRP as the exchange’s base currency.

Further, AlphaPoint CEO Salil Donde claimed investors will see low network transaction costs when moving XRP between DCEX and other marketplaces.

The exchange will include a total of 15 trading pairs with support for coins such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin among others including privacy-centric coins like Monero and Dash alongside stable-coin TrueUSD. The operator also revealed plans to add Neo and Cardano (ADA) in the coming months while adding it will offer access to all ten cryptocurrencies listed in the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index  (BGCI).

The entire exchange will be powered by AlphaPoint’s proprietary distributed ledger, which DCEX says is “secure, scalable and customizable” for operations with a processing capacity of “nearly one million transactions per second.”

New York-based AlphaPoint received $1.35 million in funding as early as 2014, CCN.com reported at the time, boasting its ability to handle a million trades per second while offering its services to crypto exchange platforms. Last month, the company raised another $15 million in a successful round of funding led by Galaxy Digital, the crypto merchant bank owned by Wall Street-mogul turned crypto bull Mike Novogratz.

Editor’s note: The article has been amended to reflect that XRP is the native token of the Ripple Consensus Ledger.

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