Ripple Signing Production Contracts at Record Pace, XRP Liquidity Crucial to Success, Says CEO Brad Garlinghouse

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Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says the San Francisco startup is bringing financial institutions onto its network at a record pace, signing three production contracts per week in early 2019.

At the Fintech Ideas Festival, Garlinghouse said many use cases for crypto assets are still emerging, but the payments use case is alive and kicking.

“We’ve had more momentum in terms of customer sales. I think we’ve signed about three production contracts. And again, these aren’t experiments. These are production contracts, per week in Q1. It was a record Q1 for us. 2018 was a huge year for us.

I look at where we are with blockchain and I think the hype got ahead of the reality in terms of just people talking about providence and even identity, which was discussed up here on the stage earlier. It’s a really hard blockchain problem that no one company is going to be able to tackle. But I think that focus has put us in a position of lots of customer momentum, and I’m super excited about 2019. I do think there’s going to be more M&A. I think any time you go through this kind of crypto winter, trough, you see people kind of get flushed out. You’ve seen layoffs in the crypto space. I view that as a healthy part of a nascent market growing, and I think it’ll force real utility, and solving a real problem.”

As for the crypto market at large, Garlinghouse says he believes most crypto assets will go away, and points to XRP’s success and liquidity as a key factor in the success of Ripple.

“There’s something like 2,000 different tokens and, by definition, underlying blockchains. I think 99% of them will go away…

The vast, vast majority are going to go away. And it’s because a lot of them were created with either an unclear use case or a use case that hasn’t proven out. And you already see that to some degree, because there’s no liquidity. And ultimately in the digital asset space liquidity is critical to the success. And so, we have been fortunate to build our technologies on something called the XRP Ledger, and that’s done well.”

In January, Ripple announced that JNFX, SendFriend, Transpaygo, FTCS and Euro Exim Bank will leverage XRP for cross-border payments. Meanwhile, 13 companies have revealed they are using or plan to adopt Ripple’s XRP-based cross-border solution xRapid.