On Thursday (January 23), Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, told the Wallet Street Journal (WSJ) that Bitcoin is not a good means of payment because BTC transactions take too long.
The Ripple CEO’s comments were made during his talk with Phillipa Leighton-Jones (Editorial Director for Innovation) at a Ripple-sponsored event (organized by the WSJ) called “Ripple Panel: Changing the Finance Industry From Within” held alongside this year's World Economic Forum Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
Although we don’t yet have a full transcript of this interview, we do know about two of the things he talked about thanks to tweets by Asheesh Birla, SVP of Product at Ripple, who was at this event.
First, it seems that although the Ripple CEO likes Bitcoin as a store of value, he does not see (at least, as of now) as a viable means of payment. The example he gave was paying for a cup of coffee at Starbucks. He believes that BTC transactions take so long to confirm that by the time you have finished paying for your coffee, “it’ll be cold.”
“I’m bullish on BTC as a store of value, but not for payments. You don’t want to use BTC at Starbucks b/c by the time you get your coffee, it’ll be cold.” –@bgarlinghouse at @WSJ Journal House … good point on why there won’t be one crypto to rule them all! pic.twitter.com/c89KrFILoc
— Asheesh Birla (@ashgoblue) January 23, 2020
Second, within the next 12 months, he sees several companies in the crypto space holding initial public offerings (IPOs) and he wants Ripple to be “on the leading side” since this is “a natural evolution” for Ripple, which raised $200 million via a Series C funding round (which valued the company at $10 billion) last month.
“In the next 12 months, you’ll see IPOs in the crypto/blockchain space. We’re not going to be the first and we’re not going to be the last, but I expect us to be on the leading side… it’s a natural evolution for our company.” –@bgarlinghouse at #WEF20
— Asheesh Birla (@ashgoblue) January 23, 2020
On Wednesday (January 22), Ripple published the “Q4 2019 XRP Markets Report”, which is a quarterly report that allows Ripple to “voluntarily provide transparency and regular updates on the company’s views on the state of the XRP market, including quarterly programmatic and institutional sales updates, relevant XRP-related announcements such as Xpring and RippleNet partnerships and commentary on previous quarter market developments.”
In Q4 2019, Ripple’s total XRP sales were down just over 80% compared to the preceding quarter ($13.08 million vs. $66.24 million). Ripple “continued the pause of programmatic sales” (to crypto exchanges), and focused exclusively on over-the-counter (OTC) sales to “a few strategic partners, who are building XRP utility and liquidity in strategic regions including EMEA and Asia.”
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
