The head of Ripple’s investment and development arm, Xpring, says he expects blockchain and cryptocurrency to radically transform the way money moves around the world.
In a new episode of The Ripple Drop, Ethan Beard says that within the next ten years, he believes crypto assets will become an essential element in the movement of money both domestic and across borders.
“I predict that over the next decade, we’re going to see blockchain and cryptocurrencies really replace the entire underpinnings and the infrastructure of the financial system. And the way money moves will touch a cryptocurrency somewhere in that stack.
It may not be end users using XRP or Bitcoin to buy things, but any payment that you make will touch blockchain, will touch a cryptocurrency in some form.”
Beard is in charge of Ripple’s multi million-dollar push to boost development and adoption of XRP, as well as grow the blockchain and crypto ecosystem as a whole.
He says his big blockchain epiphany came when he realized most of the modern financial infrastructure relies on a system of IOUs instead of the actual movement of dollars and cents.
“My ‘ah-ha’ moment for blockchain and crypto really came as I started to dig into the world of payments. And I realized that the way digital payments work today is all of us are just passing around IOUs to everyone.
Pretty much every payment you make, whether it’s through PayPal or Venmo or something like that is just a bunch of IOUs being passed. Whereas, with blockchain and with cryptocurrency, you can actually send true value through the blockchain and there’s no intermediary, no IOUs involved.”
Through Xpring, Beard has allocated half a billion dollars to companies that are building on blockchain and plan to utilize cryptocurrencies like XRP.
Xpring has also released a software development kit for XRP and a testnet wallet that allows engineers to test XRP transactions.