The Swell 2018 conference was just held in San Francisco and Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse spoke about the company’s future, XRP’s value, and the impact of the highly anticipated and newly implemented xRapid.
Garlinghouse addressed the fact that the blockchain and cryptocurrency industries are too wrapped up in speculation and not enough of people in the space are focused on developing useful and efficient products.
While XRP has sunk far from the all time high of more than $3 back in January 2018, Ripple isn’t worried and continues to work on ushering in mass adoption by introducing an amazing product. Garlinghouse says that Ripple’s only focus is to deliver speed, security, efficiency and transparency to its users and that he doesn’t concern himself too much with the current price of XRP.
“I really don’t think about the price performance. I do think about the technical performance. And I think about the fact that XRP is about 1,000 times faster than a Bitcoin transaction and about 1,000 times less expensive than a Bitcoin transaction. XRP has demonstrated it is the most efficient digital asset to solve a payment problem. What I say internally at the company, very genuinely, is I don’t know how to think about the price of XRP over three days, three weeks or three months. I think about how do we build an incredibly successful product and solutions on top of this decentralized open-source technology to solve a customer problem.”
Garlinghouse also announced that Ripple’s new cross-border payment system xRapid, is now commercially available. Ripple’s team doesn’t expect the new xRapid technology to be used by major banks and financial institutions at first but expect that many will begin to use the speedy international payment system by the end of 2019.
It seems that right now Ripple’s motivation is to illustrate the use cases that cryptocurrency can bring to the table. They even rolled out former US President Bill Clinton to champion the possible positive impact of blockchain technology.
“The more you develop new technologies like blockchain, the more the disparity of access is going to be felt,” Clinton said at the Swell conference. He also reiterated Ripple’s vision of a global economy and told the audience, “this whole blockchain deal has the potential it does only because it is applicable across national borders, income groups.”
Ripple may be interested in distracting the public from the XRP’s currently low and unstable price, but they are right in their assessment that the focus of the blockchain and cryptocurrency community must be on product efficiency rather than price speculation.
