In a recent interview, American tech entrepreneur/investor Kevin Rose talked about the early days of California FinTech firm Ripple, which he invested in years ago when he was a general partner at Google Ventures.
During an interview he gave to TechCrunch’s Connie Coizos last week, Rose gave a rare insight into the early days of Ripple as the company attempted to establish itself in the space of blockchain technology.
When asked about crypto in general and Bitcoin in particular, he said:
“Yeah, it’s something where I have a personal passion . . . I believe that it is still extremely difficult and not mainstream enough to be used as a currency.
“That said, I do believe that there’s no doubt that the future of currency is digital. If you had to create a brand new country today, you wouldn’t go out and start buying printing presses to create your currency; you would issue something digitally.
“So there will be something that comes into existence that is spendable and easy to understand and is based on some type of blockchain technology. Like, there is no doubt that will be the case.
“The problem is that 99% of the projects out there and a lot of the people who are behind them are just in this for the pure financial gain. And there’s a lot of garbage out there. And that’s unfortunate because it really drags down the high-quality projects, and it muddies the space quite a bit.”
Rose also spoke about Ripple and XRP:
“When I invested in Ripple, it would have been seven years ago, something like that…
“There was a very different world when Ripple was first getting off the ground. And the excitement that I had around Ripple was that cryptocurrency was so raw; there was no way for the enterprise to embrace it in any fashion.
“Early Ripple reminded me of a company that could come in, put some standards in place, and have these uptime guarantees and work with commercial banks and create a backbone that was based on blockchain…
“I never really saw the use case for Ripple as a currency. I understood that it was going to be used as a way to handle settlement in some capacity.”
Finally, Rose spoke about the future of crypto:
“It’s early days. I think that this is going to be a space that will continue to mature over the next couple of decades.
“There’s a good chance you won’t even know you’re using cryptocurrency…”
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