The leader of Ripple’s fundraising and development arm, Xpring, is revealing a new look at how the payments startup is trying to trigger mass adoption of the digital asset XRP.
In a new interview with Abra, Ethan Beard says the company is implementing two strategies: one to reel in financial institutions and another to bring XRP to any person or company interested in utilizing digital assets.
“I think one way to think about what we’re building is we have almost a top-down strategy that is working directly with financial institutions, providing them enterprise software that’s already customized for their world, and lets them tap into the power of XRP.
Then we have kind of a bottom’s-up strategy where we’re looking just at starting with XRP and other cryptocurrency and then focusing on developers and letting them integrate XRP and integrate cryptocurrency into their applications. It seems to me that at some point they meet. How and where they meet is kind of unclear…
It’s not crazy to think that the vast majority of money should be in someway moving over cryptocurrency – somewhere in the payment stack – and where that meets will be interesting to see.”
So far, Ripple’s Xpring has committed more than $500,000,000 to a wide-range of companies building on blockchain technology.
Ripple owns more than half of the total supply of XRP and regularly sells portions of its holdings to fund its core business and its investments.
According to Beard, Xpring is just getting started.
“We spent the first year really just trying to get a lay of the land, trying to understand how can we work well with these companies, what’s going on out there. And so some of our investing was very specifically in companies that are directly using XRP. Some of it was also just investing in amazing teams that are working in interesting areas that we find fascinating and teams that we want to be able to work with in the future.”