Ripple and XRP Update: Cory Johnson's Role As Chief Market Strategist Eliminated Due to 'Market Conditions'

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Ripple has parted ways with its chief market strategist Cory Johnson.

Ripple spokesman Tom Channick told CoinDesk the company has eliminated the position altogether, and considers Johnson’s tenure a success.

“Cory’s last year at Ripple was a success in representing the company to investors, press and regulators. Cory helped Ripple with strategy internally and overall industry education. But due to changes in market conditions, we’ve chosen to eliminate the role of Chief Market Strategist.”

Johnson spent eight years at Bloomberg TV before Ripple hired him in March of last year. He told CNBC that one of his main tasks was to explain Ripple and the digital asset XRP to investors.

“The role of Ripple as a company and XRP as a currency in financial markets, to regulators, financial institutions and investors could use more explaining. I’m going to try and explain, listen and set strategies to make it easy for Wall Street and the world of finance to understand what we’re doing.”

Last month at Cornell’s Entrepreneurship Summit in New York City, Johnson talked about the role of digital assets like XRP and Ripple’s mission to improve the speed and lower the cost of cross-border transactions.

“The technology of XRP allows for transactions to happen very fast. The current state of the art in the financial industry for moving money across borders is based on a messaging platform called Swift. Swift was written in 1973 and it’s run by a consortium of thousands of banks with thousands of employees in Belgium. And in order to make any changes to the Swift network you have to get all the disparate pieces of the financial system essentially to agree on it.

So it has not been a home of innovation… And there hasn’t been a technological solution to fix that that has come up until Ripple’s products have arrived. And if it wasn’t for XRP’s technology, you couldn’t really truly exchange value thousands of times in a second, and because of that technology, it’s why it’s able to be so cheap.”