Earlier this week, Markus Infanger, Ripple’s Global Head Institutional Markets talked about real-world use cases for liquidity while appearing as part of a panel at CryptoCompare Digital Asset Summit 2022 (held on March 30 in London).

The purpose of this panel (titled “Sold Facts, Liquid Truth: Building High Liquidity Digital Asset Markets”), which was moderated by Wall Street Journal reporter Caitlin Ostroff was to discuss digital asset liquidity.

Here are a few highlights from Infanger’s comments at this panel:

Something really key happened in this last adoption spur of 2020 in the sense that crypto, in terms of just the market size overall and also volumes, has reached critical economic mass in the eyes of even the largest financial institutions. Before it was predominantly retail-driven, and now things like Bitcoin achieving 10% of the market cap of the whole gold market or a company like Coinbase with 1500 people generating revenue commissioning from the size of a traditional investment bank with 40,000-50,000. People are just really opening up the eyes...

So, it’s fair to say, in the eyes of traditional large institutional players, this place has become too big to ignore. No, it’s not a fad — it’s not going to go away anymore. So, all of them are looking for an entry now. And also, regulators, which are obviously, key stake holders… can no longer ignore it. So, as these two dynamics now are playing out, that will just underpin so much more liquidity growth from here, as I see it…

I think everybody would agree most of the crypto liquidity right now serves sort of the use case of speculation fuelled by incentives and so forth. I am not denouncing that. I think it empowers the industry to really innovate. However, I think as crypto matures and lifts up to its full potential, I think this notion of real world utility will become increasingly more relevant.

And just to give you an example, we at Ripple with our flagship product On-Demand Liquidity, we’re literally harnessing billions of dollars of XRP liquidity to facilitate cross-border payments in a couple of seconds from say the U.S to Mexico instead of your two or three days like in legacy systems. And so, really solving a massive pain point in this world, which is how money moves around the world.

And these are use cases that can scale in the trillions. I think the future of crypto liquidity will be shifting more towards solving real world problems as opposed to just speculation...

Disclaimer

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