Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, in an interview with Bloomberg TV, shared a lot of information about how he expects the world’s 3rd largest cryptocurrency by market cap will integrate itself with the banking industry and attract more customers. The interview covered a range of topics, including SWIFT, regulation, growth in institutional investment, and Ripple’s role in the banking industry.
Garlinghouse rebutted claims made by SWIFT that blockchain technology would not be a solution to global banking challenges, saying:
The technologies that banks use today that Swift developed decades ago really hasn’t evolved or kept up with the market…Swift said not that long ago they didn’t see blockchain as a solution to correspondent banking. We’ve got well over 100 of their customers saying they disagree.
When asked about the difficulty in capturing institutional investment, Garlinghouse said that regulatory certainty has played a big role in driving institutional funds into the market, noting how the arrival of startups like Bakkt has opened up the market to these investors.
Ripple Ending 2018 On a High
Ripple has had a phenomenal 2018, trading places with Ethereum as the 2nd-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, and on-boarding several major banking partners onto its RippleNet global payments platform. The XRP token acts as a proxy currency that can be used by banks to quickly and cost-effectively make cross-border payments.
The claims made by Ripple’s CEO is backed up by data — Ripple released a Q3 report that evidenced a growth in institutional investment, and multiple cross-border payments have already been conducted by partner banks.
Despite all of this, Garlinghouse believes that 2018 didn’t quite hit the expectations, as far as institutional investment was concerned, of analysts. On the whole, however, he was extremely optimistic about the market’s prospects.
Like the market’s investors, Garlinghouse believes that the market has been burdened with hype, and the long-term survival of digital assets lies in their ability to solve real-world problems, not making castle-in-the-sky claims.
Garlinghouse’s comments revealed a high confidence in those problem-solving capabilities of Ripple:
What we’re doing and executing on a day-by-day basis is, in fact, taking over Swift,” Garlinghouse said after earlier remarking that “SWIFT is owned by the banks. We are here to help the banks.
While rumors of a partnership between SWIFT and Ripple have been making the rounds, the CEO confirmed that no such collaboration would be taking place. For the moment, Ripple seems focused on providing effective solutions to the banking industry’s problems.
