Ripple: the future of global payments?
Ripple organized a meetup in Seoul on November 6th, 2017. The event was held at Google Campus Seoul in Gangnam and it attracted almost 200 listeners there. Ripple was in South Korea for the first time and their next meetups will be held in Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong during November 2017.
The meetup was designed for anyone who wanted to learn about Ripple AKA XRP, interact with Ripple employees, and network with fellow XRP fans.
The meetup started with an overview of XRP and its technical features. After this there was an hour long Q&A session where the audience could ask questions directly from the Ripple team.
The Ripple team focused mainly on introducing what Ripple is and what are the benefits of using it. Miguel Vias, the head of XRP markets, talked most of the time and the other team members joined the conversation in the Q&A session.
What is Ripple?
Ripple is built for enterprise use; XRP offers banks and payment providers a reliable, on-demand option to source liquidity for cross-border payments.
“Ripple is the fastest and most scalable digital asset,
enabling real-time global payments
anywhere in the world.”
It currently ranks 3rd in terms of market capitalization after BTC and ETH.
Ripple was founded in 2012 and has nearly 180 employees and it has 94 million dollars in VC funding. They have offices all around the world and they are constantly expanding. Some of their locations are San Francisco, London, Luxembourg, Mumbai, Singapore, New York and Tokyo.
Ripple is focused on a single use case — they want to concentrate on international payments. They are using trade finances, securities, lendings, smart contracts, and insurances. They noticed sending money abroad was not efficient enough and the payment systems needed to improve. The current banking system is expensive and too slow for customers who want to do payments globally in real time.
How does it all work?
Ripple has made a solution for these international payment problems. They have three different solutions models.
xCurrent: Process real-time payments
- For banks and payment providers
- Instant and certain settlement
- Over 100+ Clients
xRapid: Source on-demand liquidity
- For payment providers and financial institutions
- Low-cost liquidity
- First payment provider to use xRapid for US to Mexico payments via XRP
xVia: Send global payments
- For corporates and payment providers
- Standard payments interface
- Piloting in Q4 2017
These three solutions are not fully integrated today yet. However, Ripple sees all the possibilities for all of their three payment solutions in real life cases. They believe that companies (e.g. Amazon and Uber) could benefit from xVia where the payments go across any network.
xCurrent already has over 100 clients globally and their implementation has worked well with different banks and payment providers.
Ripple’s vision: “The Internet of Value: Enable the world to move money like information moves today”
Miguel Vias wanted to highlight that Ripple has always focused only on payments since day one.
For this reason, it’s understandable why people don’t usually see Ripple as a cryptocurrency because it’s mostly marketed specifically to the banks, primarily focused on B2B.
Q&A session
Let’s say that I want to send money to Kenya and I’m in the U.S. In places like that if you want to exchange XRP to a local currency, it might be difficult because there are not so many exchanges there. Do you have any plans how to expand to rural areas?
Yes, it’s a great question. My job in Ripple is to grow the liquidity for XRP, partnering with exchanges, partnering with OTCs and liquidity pools. The flow I described earlier doesn’t have to be exactly with exchanges. There are already few folks doing similar flows by using bilateral OTC relationships in Africa. So we have to be flexible. It’s interesting, every time when you go to a new country, there are new and different problems to solve that area’s problems.
What if I’m transferring money from the U.S to India? Do you think that price differences between two countries might be an issue? Because you may have really low fees but you may need to send extra XRPs to make up the rate differences in the end?
Your question is more like what do you do if you the rate changes in the meanwhile when you start your transaction and when you end the transaction. The nice thing in XRP is that, the time that you are in between exchanges is very short. XRP confirms really quickly. The risk that market changes is really small. One of the things that we are looking to do is guaranteeing the rates, so that if there are difference we will make up the difference.
I have a question about prices. The price went down and it has been down for a long time. What’s your plan for controlling the XRP price?
We can’t control the price of XRP. We have a lot of XRP. We get very nervous about XRP. Probably more nervous than any of you here. I promise. We do not control the price of XRP. We are not holding it down, we don’t push it up. These are young markets. Every time when we go quiet, people start to react. Totally understandable. We can only see what happens to the value.
Bitcoin is leading the cryptocurrency markets. The hard fork was estimated to happen in November 2017, so I would like to hear your opinion about this?
We don’t really have a strong opinion about things that are going on with Bitcoin and Ethereum. I like to look at it from a technology stand point and see what the benefits are to the network and if there are things we could learn. The engineers and developers always share their information how to improve technologies and what they have learned. There is a lot of collaboration. Personally I got into Bitcoin in 2011. Unlike Miguel, I have never worked for a bank, I have always worked with programmers and databases. What attracted me to Ripple — I found Bitcoin’s governments issues really frustrating: you have core developers who have an agenda, you have miners who have another agenda, and users are stuck there somewhere in between. There are changes that the network needs and it has created a lot of chaos. I think this system lost a lot of talented people. Ripple has a really collaborative team, they listen to the users and markets. If there are issues, we get them fixed as soon as possible. We work all day, we even have meetings on Saturday mornings. It’s more than just a job. This is a lifestyle. The collaboration in Ripple is something that really attracts me. Every time I heard about hard forks, etc., I’m always happy that I joined Ripple.
