CoinGate now accepts XRP as payment at more than 4,500 webshops

The payment processor CoinGate has accepted Ripple payments since 1 February. For more than 4,500 online shops, it is now possible to have customers pay with XRP. In addition to XRP, CoinGate accepts 50 other cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).

CoinGate is officially called Virtualios Valiutos, and is a Lithuanian company. Since 2015 the company has been processing crypto-payments for a large number of web shops.

When a webshop wants customers to pay with crypto, CoinGate can handle this for them. CoinGate consults various cryptocurrency exchanges to find the best deal and calculates the price of a product in crypto. The customer can choose with which crypto he or she wants to pay, and can do this with their own wallet. The webshop can then choose to exchange the crypto directly in euros, dollars, Bitcoin or Ethereum.

CoinGate decided to add XRP to its offer after it received a lot of demand from the community to XRP. Now that the payment processor supports XRP, this also means that customers in the EU can buy the cryptocurrency with debit and credit cards.

Some do not find the Ripple network decentralized enough, because many of the servers are managed by the developers themselves. CoinGate wrote in a blog post about that issue:

Some might say that the network is not fully decentralized, because in the beginning the substantial part of the servers is managed by a single company. However, this is not really the case. In fact, there is an ongoing decentralization strategy for the future phases of the development of XRP ledgers. In short, the XRP ledger will have more third validators who join the club. For every two trusted and very secure nodes, one node run by developers will be removed. It will further decentralize the network and at the same time scale it up to better performance.