Technology

Itfinally happening.Ripple is making a push to expand the use of the XRP cryptocurrency it created into new verticals and segments beyond the payment and banking space where the company is focused.

XRP is the worldthird-largest cryptocurrencybehind only bitcoin, the original breakout artist, and Ethereum, the platform that most developers plump for. XRP has a total ‘coin market cap& of $28.7 billion today, according to Coinmarketcap.com, and yet it is barely used beyond a handful of pilot customer deployments that Ripple has announced.

That might change soon, however, after Ripple announced a new initiative calledXpring— pronounced ‘Spring& — which is aimed at bringing entrepreneurs and their businesses over to XRP, both the cryptocurrency and the smart ledger, to build an ecosystem.The projectwill use a mixture of investment, grants, and incubation to lure companies and expand the use of XRP whilst allowing Ripple to continue to focus on its financial services business.

Ripple says it doesn&t control or own XRP — it&sa hotly debated issue since it owns over 60 percent of all tokens — but it has a vested interest in seeing it succeed. Even in the short space of six months the need for variety has been clear.

The value of XRP shot up in December and January during acrypto surge which saw bitcoin reach an all-time high of nearly $20,000 per coin. The collective value of XRP was worth more than $128 billion at peak before a market crash in January walked those prices back significantly. Ripple has come under fire for a perceived lack of use for XRP, which has been marketed as a tool for banks but has attracted only cross-border payment services as customers.

Going beyond Ripple

Ripple has hired Ethan Beard, formerly director ofFacebookdevelopernetwork and an ex-EIR atGreylock Partners, to lead Xpringand more broadlyRippledeveloper program.

&The goal is to support businesses that we believe would see benefit from building upon the XRP ledger,&Eric van Miltenburg, Ripple SVP of business operations, told TechCrunch in an interview. &Support will come in a variety of ways: investment, incubation, and the potential of acquisition or grants. We&refocused on proven entrepreneurs who can use the ledger and XRP to really address their customers& problems.&

Van Miltenburg said Ripple has been approached by entrepreneurs and companies wanting to work with XRP &for years,& but nothing came of discussions because Ripple is focused on financial services.

&Therebeen enough interaction to say theresomething here [and]now is the time,& he added. &Over the last four to six months [the idea of Xpring] has really crystallized.&

Ethan Beard speaking at LeWeb in 2010 (via Adam Tinworth/Flickr)

If you&ve been keeping an eye on Ripple this year, the launch of the program won&t be a huge surprise.

Aside from the fact that many in the crypto space are pulling together their own funds — whether it be informally as a company, or more broadly across industries like the Ethereum Community Fund— Ripple has quietly upped its investment focus.

Initially, two Ripple executives took part in a $25 million investment in January for Bay Area-based startup Omnithen in March CEO Brad Garlinghouse told TechCrunchthat Ripple would &certainly partner with companies that are looking to use XRP in lots of different ways& whilst maintaining its focus as a business.

Xpring is that project.

Enter the Bieber… kinda

Van Miltenburg and Beard told TechCrunch that the kind of segments where they see the most potential for XRP are trade finance,gaming,virtual goods,identity, real estate, media and micro-payments.

When I put it to them that XRP is looking for reasons to justify its $28 billion market cap,van Miltenburg claimed that XRP is far less speculative than other cryptocurrencies.

&Therea use case we have established for it: Ripple is one of the only enterprise solutions on the blockchain thatout in production. We believe theXRP ledger and the asset has a performance profile that lends it to others,& he said.

He added that Ripple has seen interest from projects that &started on a blockchain that isn&t living up to their needs,& and that Xpring could focus on rehousing would-be blockchain migrants. However, it won&t be investing in ICOs, buying other tokens or hosting ICOs on the XRP blockchain,van Miltenburg said.

Aside from Omni — which said it will &soon& add XRP as currency in its marketplace service — Xpring has pulled in a couple of early names. Scooter Braun, the man best known for managing Justin Bieber, is &pursuing several endeavors that will use XRP to improve artists& ability to monetize and manage their content.&

Neither van Miltenburg nor Beard could be specific on exactly what Braun is working on — there are already a number of blockchain-based digital rights and music streaming projects in development — but they said he isn&t one to jump on a bandwagon.

Braun said in a canned statement that he is &excited our team is among the first in the entertainment industry to lean into the blockchain movement.&

&This is only the beginning as we will continue to build out more use cases for XRP,& he added.

Other early partners being announced today include Ripple CTOStefan Thomas who is transitioning out of his role to build micro-payment services using XRP via a new venture called Coil. In addition, Xpring has backed VC firm Blockchain Capital while Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, raised his latest fund entirely in XRP.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse previously spoke of plans to partner with companies on XRP (via Christopher Michel/Flickr)

Building an ecosystem

Generally, the plan for exactly how Xpring will work seems fluid at this point.

Beard spoke of the next wave of innovation coming from the blockchain, much like FacebookTimeline and social graph helped scale companies like Spotify, Zynga and BuzzFeed from startups into major tech names. He believes that, in turn, Xpring and XRP can help &build new businesses and change how industries function.&

Van Miltenburg was non-committal in terms of goals.

&Our motivation is to ensure that the XRP ledger and digital asset reaches its full potential. We want to see an extremely healthy and robust XRP ecosystem; that benefits Ripple and all others,& he explained.

Ripple is known to incentive its partners with XRP bonuses for signing, but it isn&t talking numbers this time, either the specific incentives that it is giving to high-profile names like Braun, or the overall budget that it has put behindXpring.

&For the right opportunities, we can be aggressive. Thereno hesitation or reluctance to make big bets with opportunities that require investment,& is all van Miltenburg would say.

You can bet a large chunk of capital (XRP) is supporting Xpring. The current system with hundreds of cryptocurrencies isn&t sustainable, those that make it through will be the ones that offer the most value, and ecosystems could well be a measure of that. XRP, as the third-largest cryptocurrency, has considerable expectations on it which, as the crash earlier this year showed, can wipe out money faster than it made crypto wealth.

You can bet that Xpring, while outside of Ripplecore financial services focus, will be a very key focus for building a community and ultimately usage for XRP. The question is how the startup community will reach to a different kind of investment option.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

As Twitter develops an ever-closer hold on how it manages services around its real-time news and social networking service, a pioneer in Twitter analytics is calling it quits. Favstar, an early leader in developing a way to track and review how your and other peopleTweets were getting liked and retweeted by others on the network, has announced that it will be shutting down on June 19 — a direct result, its creator Tim Haines notes, of changes that Twitter will be making to its own APIs, specifically around its Account Activity API, which is coming online at the same time that another API, User Streams, is being depreciated.

Favstar and others rely on User Streams to power its services. &Twitter… [has] not been forthcoming with the details or pricing,& Favstarcreator Tim Haines said of the newer API. &Favstar can&t continue to operate in this environment of uncertainty.&

Favstarannouncement was made over the weekend, but the issue for it and other developers has actually been brewing for a year.

Twitter announced back in Decemberthat, as part of the launch of theAccount Activity API(originally announced April 2017), it would be shutting down User Streams on June 19.

User Streams are what Favstar, and a number of other apps such asTalon,Tweetbot,Tweetings, andTwitterrific(as pointed out in thisblog post signed by all four on &Apps of a Feather&), are built on. Introduced as the Twitter Streaming APIfor developers, the aim was to provide a way for developers to get continuous updates from a number of Twitter accounts — needed for services that either provided alternative Twitter interfaces or a way of parsing the many Tweets on the platform — in a way that did not slow the whole service down.

The newer Account Activity API provides a number of features to developers to help facilitate tracking Twitter and using services like direct messaging for business purposes:

As you can see, some of the features that the newer API covers are directly linked to functionality you get via Favstar. The crux of the problem, writes Haines, is that Twitter hadn&t given Favstar and other developers that had been working with User Streams (and other depreciating functionality) answers about pricing and other details so that they could see if a retooling of their services would be possible. (Twitter has provided a guide, it seems, but it doesn&t appear to address these points.)

The post on Apps of a Feather further spells out the technical issues:

&The new Account Activity API is currently in beta testing,but third-party developers have not been given access and time is running out,& the developers write. &With access we might be able to implement some push notifications, but they would be limited at the standard level to 35 Twitter accounts & our products must deliver notifications to hundreds of thousands of customers. No pricing has been given for Enterprise level service with unlimited accounts & we have no idea if this will be an affordable option for us and our users.&

One of the consequences is that &automatic refresh of your timeline just won&t work,& they continue. &There is no web server on your mobile device or desktop computer that Twitter can contact with updates. Since updating your timeline with other methods is rate-limited by Twitter, you will see delays in real-time updates during sporting events and breaking news.&

Favstar has been around since 2009 — its name a tip of the hat to the original &like& on Twitter, which was a star, not a heart. Haines writes that at its peak, it had some 50 million users and was a &huge hit& with those who realised how the network could be leveraged to build up audiences outside of Twitter — including comedians and celebrities, tech people, journalists, and so on. Italso tinkered with its service over time, and added in a Pro tier, to make it more user-friendly.

Somewhat unusual for a popular app, Favstar appears to have always been bootstrapped.

But there have been two trends at play for years now, one specific to Twitter and another a more general shift in the wider industry of apps:

The first, regarding Twitter, is that the company has been sharpening its business focus for years to find viable, diverse and recurring sources of revenue, while at the same time putting a tighter griparound how its platform is appropriated by others. This has led the company to significantly shift its relationship with developers and third parties. In some cases, it has ceased to support and work with third-party apps that it feels effectively overlap with features and functions that Twitter offers directly.

In the case of Favstar, the service rose in prominence at a time when Twitter appeared to completely ignore the star feature. MG once described the Favorite as &the unwanted step child feature of Twitter. Though it has been around since the early days of the service, they have never really done anything to promote its use.&

Fast forward to today, and Twitter has not only revamped the feature replacing the star with a heart (I still prefer the star, for what itworth), but Twitter uses those endorsements to help tune its algorithm, and populate your notifications tab, and to provide analytics to users on how their Tweets are doing. In other words, itdoing quite a bit of what Favstar does.

And if you think of how Twitter has developed its own business model in recent years, with a push for video and working with news organisations and other media brands, the same early users of Favstar as detailed by Haines (celebs, news and other media organizations, etc.) are exactly the targets that Twitter has been trying to connect with, too.

The other, more general, trend that this latest turn has teased out is the one that we&ve heard come up many times before. Building services dependent on another platform can be a precarious state of affairs for a developer. You never know when the platform owner might simply decide to pull the plug on you. Your success could lead to many users, business growth, and even an acquisition by the platform itself — but it could nearly as quickly lead to your downfall if the platform views you as a threat, and decides to cut you off instead.

Interestingly, there could be some life left in Favstar in another galaxy far, far away. We&ve reached out both to Haines and to Twitter for further comment and will update this post as and when we learn more.

Rejoice Nintendo fans: the Japanese gaming giant is bringing the NES Classic backto retail stores this summer.

Nintendo said the console will go on sale again across the U.S. on June 29, with the SNES Classic also set to be available until the end of this year. It isn&t clear what the situation will be outside of the U.S., however.

The news is welcome but not entirely a surprise. Nintendo said last September that it would bring both consoles — which were originally supposed to be one-offs — back in 2018 following a positive reception and strong sales.

The company originally killed off the hit NES Classic Edition withan announcement last Apriland it had originally said that the SNES version would not live beyond 2017.The NES system was a surprise hit last year, but the SNES version was even morepopular. Nintendo previously revealed that it sold more on launch day in August than the NES sold in the whole of last year.

&Fans have shown their unbridled enthusiasm for these Classic Edition systems, so Nintendo is working to put many more of them on store shelves,& Nintendo said last year.

The two classic systems are part of a new focus for Nintendo, which includes the top-selling Switch console and its first moves into mobile gaming via Pokémon GO and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. The company recently clocked impressive financial returns — including a 500 percent jump in annual profit — as the strategy begins to pay off.