What concerns me about these types of articles is they often specifically go out of their way not to mention if it involves a private blockchain or something that is publically available. Ethereum has been using that type of deception where many of the articles turn out to be referencing a private chain; but, the announcement is used to pump the public chain. The wording of this article suggests to me that it has nothing to do with the public XRP.
It's unfortunate that this type of deception has become commonplace.
We've been pretty clear that our strategy is to eliminate obstacles to payments being bridged with XRP. The obstacles are eliminated whether the payment takes place on the public ledger or off it.
It's precisely the same situation with bitcoin. People using colored coins on ledger don't really help the value of bitcoins much. But companies exchanging bitcoins, even off ledger, do.
Really the location of the payment doesn't much matter.
We spent several years trying to convince FIs to make transactions on a public ledger. We had some success, but the requirement to use a single, public ledger brought huge downsides. It reduces privacy. It limits throughput. And it means everyone has to transact by the exact same, inflexible rules even though people really do want different things.
It is way, way better to have the option to use a public blockchain where its benefits make sense and avoid it where they don't.
So we changed our approach. Now, we have a software product that takes care of everything that has to happen around a payment. The actual payment itself can take place on a public ledger or it can take place using ILP. FIs seem to like this approach a lot. The objections to being forced to hold a crypto-currency, forced to transact in public, forced to rely on third parties whose performance can't be guaranteed, and so on are lifted. Now, if XRP can bridge that payment, there's no technical obstacle.
The beauty is that banks can use this system even if XRP can't bridge a single payment. And then, when it can effectively bridge one in a thousand payments, it will. And if it can ever effectively bridge one in a hundred payments, that will happen. It's a path to solve the various chicken and egg problems where nobody will invest in a system that makes using a crypto-currency even possible until there's enough volume/capacity to handle a significant fraction of payments.
Then, we can pick the best corridors and target them, and the payments will flow.