At the recent Goldman Sachs Technology & Internet Conference in San Francisco, Asheesh Birla, Senior Vice President (SVP) of Product at Ripple, talked about how Ethereum and XRP are being increasingly entrenched in the areas of decentralized finance (DeFi) and cross-border payments respectively.
With regard to Ethereum, Birla, who was speaking as part of a panel, stated:
“I think that Ethereum is really interesting in that over $1 billion in loans is the DeFi ecosystem. So they really own that narrative.
“They have products and an ecosystem around that narrative… And with DeFi, as the ecosystem expands it will be increasingly hard to dislodge Ethereum because it’s so liquid for those use cases.”
As for XRP, he said:
“XRP, the digital asset that powers the Ripple network in any destination where our products are live – XRP is the most liquid digital asset.
“And so for cross-border payments and remittance products, I think that XRP will perform really well in those use cases… with cross-border payments, I think it’s going to be increasingly hard to dislodge XRP.”
Birla also mentioned:
“… everyone has to find their niche and use case and build that ecosystem. And the further ahead you get, the harder it is to dislodge.”
Birla also talked about Ripple’s remittance volume along the U.S.-Mexico corridor:
“One of the things I’m really proud of at Ripple is last week over at Ripple, using XRP, we did 7.5% of the total US dollar to Mexico remittance volume over our product. So things are moving.
“We’re seeing more projects with real-world adoption. We don’t need more experiments. We want to see this change the world.”
Finally, Birla spoke about the benefits for banks of using Ripple’s XRP-powered On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) product:
“Programming money is really good, in that there’s no intermediaries. It’s freely moving and for our products at Ripple that’s a big deal because, today, if you want to move money across borders, you have to have relationships in each country you want to move money in.
“You have to have a bank account. You have to have pesos in Mexico.
“And now what you can do with digital assets and XRP is you just trust the digital asset to move into that country. You don’t need that bank account and you don’t need that pre-funding in Mexican pesos. You leverage crypto exchanges and between crypto exchanges there’s no legal agreement. They’re just trusting that the value will move using a digital asset. And that’s a game changer.
“You can launch in a new country in a matter of weeks. We’re trying to get it down to days but you can launch in a matter of weeks.
“Before that, you had to open a bank account. You had to wire money down there. You had to get the right kind of regulations. That’s a big game changer.
“Again, you’re removing expensive correspondent banks in the middle, and you’re replacing it. You used to trust them, but now you’re trusting a set of computers and a digital asset, and I think that’s a big deal.”
