Ripple Trade To Shut Down in January – GateHub Takes its Place

An interesting announcement was made late last night when news broke that Ripple Trade will halt all operations come January 13, 2016. Customers are advised to withdraw all of their remaining funds before that date, and a new platform has been announced. GateHub is the name of this new platform, which has been created to develop a trustworthy business around the consumer and gateway use case.

Also read: Spending US Dollars From The Cloud With AirTM Is No Direct Competition for Bitcoin

Out With Ripple Trade, Enter GateHub

Truth be told, the announcement of shutting down Ripple Trade came as quite a surprise to a lot of people active in the digital currency industry. Considering how their engineers have been working on the project for over two years, and the keen interest from financial institutions all over the world, no one really expected anything like this to happen.

But in fairness, the news is not all doom and gloom either. In an email communication sent out this morning, Ripple apologizes for the confusion caused by their earlier announcement. Ripple as an ecosystem is going nowhere anytime soon, and the growth and expansion of XRP as a currency will remain an integral part of the process.

Furthermore, there is an optional migration path for users switching over from Ripple Trade to GateHub, which will act as the new trading platform. All it will take is just a few clicks, and all of one’s personal Ripple transactions can be migrated in a streamlined fashion. Further details will be announced in a few weeks.

GateHub will act as a platform to develop a trustworthy business around the consumer and gateway use case. To put this into layman’s terms: more products will be built on top of the Ripple ecosystem, and GateHub will be the location where all of the action takes place in the future.

It is important for all users to transfer all of their Ripple Trade funds to either GateHub or another wallet provider prior January 13, 2016. It will be interesting to see how many people decide to migrate to GateHub, and how many users will either leave the Ripple ecosystem completely or use alternative wallet solutions.

According to the email communication, GateHub will be ready over the next week although no official date has been announced yet. More information on migration one’s Ripple wallet to GateHub will follow shortly, and the Ripple support staff is available to answer any and all questions people may have.

Source: Ripple Newsletter

Images credit 1,2