Crypto Firm Ripple to Take 40% Stake in Asia Payments Specialist

Joanna Ossinger, Bloomberg News

Illuminated mining rigs operate inside racks at the CryptoUniverse cryptocurrency mining farm in Nadvoitsy, Russia, on Thursday, March 18, 2021. The rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has prompted the greatest push yet among central banks to develop their own digital currencies. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Crypto firm Ripple Labs Inc. is planning to take a 40% stake in Asian cross-border payments specialist Tranglo.

Ripple said in a statement Tuesday that the tie-up will help meet demand for the use of its affiliated token XRP in transactions. The announcement comes about a week after Brooks Entwistle, a former executive at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc., became Ripple’s managing director of Southeast Asia.

Entwistle said in an interview that Ripple is expanding into new markets in the region to meet “demand for cheaper, faster and more reliable cross-border payments with the use of crypto.”

Tranglo is based in Malaysia and has processed over 20 million transactions totaling $4 billion in value since its inception, according to Ripple.

Ripple and some of its top executives are being sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly misleading investors in XRP by selling more than $1 billion of the virtual tokens without registering with the agency.

The company is continuing its discussions with the regulators, Entwistle said.