Ripple is attempting to distribute their XRP cryptocurrency as fairly and widely as possible, and Asheesh Birla, Vice President of Product at Ripple, recently revealed that Ripple wants to provide XRP to more than 1 billion people in India.
Birla shared these admirable goals during a panel on Scaling and Digital Disruption in Fintech, as reported by Express.co.uk.
According to Birla, onboarding the Indian market onto XRP is an important goal of Ripple’s. India has the world’s second-fastest growing economy after China, and is expected to be an economic superpower by 2030, according to a US intelligence report.
However, getting 2 billion people to use XRP has proven to be a difficult problem, as stated by Birla:
“We looked early on at India, and we looked at two billion people – a huge market. And we decided, how do you get two billion people onto Ripple? Do we give the currency away to every Indian, that’s like two billion – just give it away?”
After pondering giving away over 2 billion XRP, Ripple decided to go another route, which was through the banking industry:
“We realized that if you get the top three banks in India onto Ripple, you get 80 percent of the market share. And then we looked at – where’s the future? And so we realized in the next five years, one billion people will become banked in India, but they’ll be banked through their phone. So then we started targeting mobile phone providers and telcos.”
Birla then said that Ripple now has about 50% of the market in India, either integrated onto Ripple or in the deal. Birla then proclaimed that they will take this information to Wells Fargo and say there’s no better way to send into India than Ripple.
Do you think people in India will adopt Ripple’s XRP cryptocurrency before Bitcoin? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
