Is Ripple Moving Away From XRP? The Convera Deal Raises Questions

One of the world’s largest commercial payments companies just tied itself to Ripple’s blockchain infrastructure, and the announcement is already dividing opinion before the ink has dried.

Convera, which operates across 140 currencies and 200 countries, confirmed a strategic partnership with Ripple today to offer stablecoin-enabled cross-border payment and treasury solutions for business clients. The deal targets corridors where traditional payment rails are slow, expensive or simply unreliable.

The model at the centre of it is being called the stablecoin sandwich. Payments leave in fiat, settle via regulated stablecoins in the middle, and arrive in fiat on the other end. Convera handles the customer experience. Ripple provides the liquidity, on and off-ramping and settlement infrastructure underneath.

“By partnering with Convera, we’re combining trusted global payment infrastructure with stablecoin-powered settlement to give businesses more control over how and when they move value across borders,” said Aaron Slettehaugh, SVP of Product at Ripple.

Nobody Said XRP

Here is where it gets interesting.

The announcement does not mention XRP once. It does not explicitly reference the XRP Ledger either. For a community that has spent years watching Ripple build toward exactly this kind of institutional partnership, the omission landed badly.

“Forget no mention of XRP, they don’t even explicitly state they’re using the XRPL,” one observer posted within minutes of the announcement going live.

Crypto lawyer Bill Morgan, known for his measured takes on Ripple-related developments, noted dryly: “They didn’t call it an XRP sandwich model.”

His earlier observation was more pointed. The partnership specifically uses regulated stablecoins at the settlement layer, not XRP. Whether that changes over time, or whether RLUSD plays a role that was simply not disclosed today, remains an open question.