“There is an opportunity to fundamentally rewire how modern financial infrastructure works in the pre funding. You have about $10 trillion pre-funded to banks around the world in order to enable cross-border payments. If you could take advantage of crypto liquidity to fund real-time payments, you could actually take that $10 trillion and use it for other purposes, which is great for society. It’s great for banking. It’s great for industry. So that’s what we’re trying to rewire. We’re lucky to now have about 200 banks that have signed up. We’ve got a long way to go”
These were the CEO of Ripple Brad Garlinghouse’s words during the World Economic Forum week in Switzerland explaining that there are high chances that blockchain technologies will improve the conditions social, banking and industrial relations operate under. The forum consisted of a discussion panel on the future of cryptocurrency.
He also commented on the cultural development of blockchain technologies, pointing out that many people in the world relate cryptocurrencies to ‘’Silk Road and illicit, illegal’’ activities saying that there has to be a fix.
Ripple [XRP] and Bitcoin [BTC]
Brad compared Ripple (XRP) to Bitcoin (BTC) saying that he thinks Bitcoin could solidify its status as a strong store of value in future. He also said that XRP is far more scalable compared to BTC as far as payments are concerned. He admitted having money in the leading cryptocurrency seeing an improvement potential in the coin’s cost and scalability.
“If you take Bitcoin as it exists today as a static thing, the scalability problems and proof of work as a model have some real significant limitations. There are lots of people trying to improve that. Maybe they’ll be successful. Maybe they won’t. I’m not prepared to say Bitcoin goes to zero. I still own Bitcoin partly because, as Glen describes, it may become just a store of value. However, at Ripple, we build upon a technology called XRP because it’s extremely scalable as compared to Bitcoin. It’s extremely low-cost and extremely fast relative to how Bitcoin works.”
He explains that in order to change the current financial landscape, the Ripple team aims to transform the speed and cost of cross-border remittances.
