On Monday (3 December 2018), Cory Johnson, who joined Californian FinTech firm Ripple as Chief Market Strategist on 9 March 2018, spoke as part of a panel (at a “CryptoMondays” event held in San Francisco, and streamed live last night on BeFast.TV) discussing cryptocurrencies.
Johnson was first asked to review the 2018 and to point out the things that he had found interesting:
“The price of XRP, although it’s up in the last few days, has fallen dramatically over the course of the year, and yet the company Ripple is doing better than ever before. We’ve seen the sales cycle go from a new customer every six weeks to two new customers a week. We’ve got over 150 banks and financial institutions that are using Ripple’s products on the software side. So, there’s a real divergence between the price of the digital assets and the adoption of the blockchain.”
He also addressed accusations by Bitcoin maximalists that Ripple is not decentralized:
“Ripple is not decentralized. Ripple is a company with a CEO and a board of directors. It is a centralized corporation. XRP is certainly decentralized… Centralization is not a permanent state. You could argue that Bitcoin was decentralized in its early days. You could also argue that it’s more centralized than it’s ever been… XRP has over 160 validators. We control 5% of the validators. How can XRP be centralized? So, it does get to the definition of what centralization means, but if it means the ability of one entity to control the network, it is unquestionably true that XRP is not centralized.”
The moderator then asked Johnson if this whole centralization/decentralization issue freaks out financial institutions that Ripple talks to. He replied:
“I don’t think we’ve lost a single potential customer over this discussion.”
Johnson also talked about the crypto custody:
“These custody players seem like they are getting closer and closer to providing institutional custody, and I think that’s going to be a sea change in valuation of digital assets. But it is one of many dominoes that has to fall.”
During the Q&A session, a member of the audience asked Johnson why was xCurrent so much more popular than xRapid among Ripple’s customers. Johnson answered:
“xCurrent and xRapid solve different problems that are related. Banks don’t want all their financial transactions on the public ledger… For some solutions, xCurrent is perfectly fine. For others, xRapid is right. For some, a combination might be right.”
Featured Image Courtesy of Ripple
