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-Next Thurs Dec 21, QnA with David Schwartz
-XRP ledger 5 years anniversary
Q: What do you attribute the huge jump in price of XRP and all the market cap jump over the past 3 days when XRP price has been hanging around .20 to .25 for quite a while?
A: It's always hard to pinpoint the exactly what sparks any market rally and in XRP as well as other digital assets. I think for me, Ripple remains focused on how to make the XRP system as successful as possible. -Driving more real utility. At the end of the day, digital assets and the value of digital assets will be driven by the utility that they create. The more customers using them, the more production dynamics we see, the better.
And we did a simple chart summarizing how xrp performs vs other digital assets on price per txn, throughput, txn time. And XRP performed incredibly well on those metrics. Look at that and apply it to a really big market of global payments, a multi-trillion one. We have real customers, solving a real problem. And I think we have done a better job of helping the market understand the dynamics, in light of some of the challenges of other digital assets such as scaling.
Q: You guys at Ripple must be rich now. So, why do you still come to work?
A: When I wake up in the morning, I have no trouble about getting excited to coming to work. What's going on for Ripple, the digital asset marketplace, we're just getting started, we're in the early innings. I was fortunate to move out to SV in 1997 in the early days of the Internet, the Internet of information. And I look at what Ripple's vision is, anabling the Internet of value. It's the earliest innings and the progress we've made in cross border payment is just one piece of the Internet of value puzzle. When I look at the years ahead, I can see many many years of growth in the core of what we're doing as well as other vertical opportunities. I love the journey, the community that's on the journey with us and I think it's a ton of fun. We also have an amazing team here and it's really fun to work with great people.
Q: Will Ripple be on Coinbase and if so, do you have any ideas when? Thanks #XRP
A: XRP liquidity is a critical priority to success of the business. Period. Full stop.
When you think of what we're trying to do, if we don't have good liquidity between fiat and xrp and i mean that on a global basis, it's going to be hard for us to be succesful. The good news is we have had a lot of good liquidity on those pairs so today we're listed on 50 exchanges around the world. Clearly, we want XRP to be listed on more exchanges that are reputable, regualted in those appropriate markets. So it is a very HIGH priority for us to be listed more broadly, and we're continuing ot work on that with partners around the globe. But we also don't make announcements until we;re ready to make those announcements. That's (also) the case for some of the customers that we're working with today and evaluating on how we can work together.
Q: What are your top 3 priorities for 2018?
A:
1) More active nodes(financial instituitions doing more volume. we now have over 100 active customers that we talk about publicly. traditional banks as well as financial kind of payment providers. We talked about Korex recently using xRapid, so getting more active users getting more volume. It would be top priority for sure. I think in a landscape, and lets be honest here, there's a lot of hype around blockchain and there's a lot fo experimetns around blockchain. And i think for us, we stand apart and uniquely we have real customers, real volume and we want to keep that going and even accelerate it. There's tremendous network effect that happens. One bank, SEB one of the largest bank in Sweden, has talked publicly about some of the volume they're doing and that they have moved hundreds of millions of dollars just in the last months between Swedne and NY. ANd that;s just one corridor and one bank and when you start thinking about it, as that bank adds other corridors and as more banks go live, you get a kind of exponential growth in volume.
2) And 2 is around XRP liquidity, making sure that on a global basis, as we con't to work with exchanges globally and mkt makers, making sure that we can make the XRP ecosystem successful around a liquidity basis.
3) And 3 is kind of a newer priority and something we'll work on in 2018, is investing in other use case for the XRP ledger, I think we've been successful in part because we have been very focused in solving a specific problem, understanding that customers and driving a solution that work.s There are other use cases and we've demostrated and shown that the XRP on a perfromance point of view performs very favourably to other digital assets. We will definitely partner with, invest in other use cases that can be built upon on the XRP ledger.
Q: How do you think the escrow that happened recently will help us small investors?
A: Providing predictable supply, having the entire ecosystem understand what is the supply. And I have no doubt in the last 5 years, that Ripple has demostrated that we're the most interested party in a healthy XRP ecosystem. And that our actions have demonstrated that we have acted in a way that is appropriate for the ecosystem and fostering good things. But we did hear from the community that there still this overhang so we wanted to remove the perception that there's a risk there and so we took the step of locking up 55bn in escrow for 55 months where each month 1bn is unlocked and can be used. Certainly, we won't be using most of it and we will look at adding 56, 57th month and roll them over. We want to make sure the ecosystem has a predictable supply and that they understand what's happening.
//And we have released a quarterly report on XRP market and we encourage you to read that on ripple.com. [https://ripple.com/insights/q1-2017-xrp-markets-report/](
https://ripple.com/insights/q1-2017-xrp-markets-report/)
Q: We get a lot of qns on the decentralization of the XRP ledger. Any comments you want to make on that?
A: That's a great question and you know what I'll do maybe, I'll give another plug to our friend David Schwartz, he's doing the live stream on the 21st next Thurs. He has publicly said that his number one priority is to increase the decentralization of XRP ledger. There's a lot of things we have done already and there's some misunderstanding out there about those points. Ripple as a company will continue to invest in the XRP ledger and as a centralized group. But make no mistake about it, it is a decentralized ledger today and we'll continue to invest to make sure that it is even more decentralized in the future.
Q: What do you think the most critical achievement of Ripple and XRP was this year?
A: I think the most critical demonstrated success goes back to real customers, even for us Ripple who have been at it for quite a while, focused on our clear customers. But going from tests and proof of concepts to real production to real volume moving real money. Those are huge milestones and we have talked about having over 100 customers and it's just not test, it's real money. There are really powerful network effects that happened, the more nodes you have, the value of the network, Metcalfe's law, grows exponentially on the number of nodes on the network.
Q: Where do you see this company in 10 years?
A: Even before I took over as CEO, Chris Larsen as one of the founders have in the earliest days have talked about this Internet of value. And it's not a five year journey, that's a 10 year, 20 year journey and I think we're 20-ish years into the Internet of information and we're on that same long journey for Internet of value. And I see Ripple today with payments analogous to where Amazon was with books. Amazon was a bookseller and they were a fabulous and fantastic bookseller and they have demonstrated that by building some robust core infrastructure, they were able to expand and to do other things. While I'm incredibly pleased with what we're doing in payments that is a massive opportunity , we have aspirations over say a 10 year arc of time to do other things.
