Ripple has partnered with Lunu to enable luxury retailers to start accepting cryptocurrencies for payments.
According to a Tuesday announcement, Lunu, a cryptocurrency payment services firm will leverage Ripple’s Liquidity Hub “to accelerate the acceptance of crypto payments by optimizing the exchange of crypto assets to fiat in one place at competitive prices.”
Launched in November 2021, Ripple’s Liquidity Hub is a product that seeks to support long-term crypto adoption by enabling users to access deep liquidity in the markets. Furthermore, the product offers, as Ripple puts it, “turnkey integration and smart order routing to source cryptocurrencies at the best market prices”. The Liquidity hub currently supports six cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Litecoin.
On the other hand, to facilitate transactions, the Lunu system combines a terminal and widget with a processing service that conducts “instant auctions”. According to the firm’s website, that system is based on a pool of independent arbitrageurs and assigns the market price from the crypto to fiat exchange while the systems oracles monitor and verify the transactions in third-party blockchains. Through Ripple’s partnership with Lunu, retailers and their crypto-paying customers will be able to seamlessly access crypto assets from a wide range of venues under the hub.
“For luxury retailers, it is vital to stay on top of the latest trends, and when it comes to payments the greatest innovation is coming from the evolving crypto scene. Thanks to Lunu these retailers get access to new, younger, more affluent audiences that are constantly growing in numbers,” said Rajesh Madhaiyan, Director of Product, Lunu.
Currently, Lunu serves a wide range of luxury retailers in Europe including Farfetch, Off-White, Browns, and Steven Stone, enabling them to get paid in a wide range of cryptocurrencies. In November 2021, the Berlin-based firm partnered with Paxful, a peer-to-peer (P2P) Bitcoin and crypto exchange service platform enabling Paxful’s customers to shop at any of Lunu’s partner stores using their Paxful wallets.
With the appetite for crypto payment options increasing among major luxury brands, crypto service providers have been positioning themselves strategically for growth. There has been an “extremely strong” demand specifically for Ripple’s products which are mainly centered around crypto enterprise solutions.
Last year, the number of transactions on RippleNet, Ripple’s “state-of-the-art infrastructure” for enabling real-time payments more than doubled, with its annualized payment volume run tapping $15B. Moreover, the company sees this growth holding up with 70% of financial institutions in Europe expected to adopt blockchain for payments in the next five years.
