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Media mogul and business news radio host Randi Zuckerberg invited cryptocurrency and blockchain leaders to speak on her new weekly show on channel 132 at Sirius XM.
The creator of Facebook Live and CEO of Zuckerberg Media just wrapped up interviews with industry insiders Meltem Demirors, the chief strategy officer at CoinShares, a crypto asset investment firm managing $750 million in assets; Asheesh Birla, senior vice president of product and corporate development at XRP-powered payments startup Ripple; and Alex Tapscott, co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute.
Zuckerberg is hosting discussions with industry leaders to inform listeners about blockchain and how the tech is reshaping a wide spectrum of industries – from healthcare to payments to supply chain logistics to food.
The tech entrepreneur and crypto supporter focuses on blockchain’s most popular use case, Bitcoin, which has powered over half billion transactions to date, and says Ripple, which uses its native digital asset XRP to transfer money across borders, is revolutionizing the way payments move.
Demirors argues that Bitcoin represents a shift from the rights of the state to self sovereignty and the rights of the individual, as it sparks a global discourse on monetary policy, taxes and financial freedom.
“Until Bitcoin, we had never really thought about why we value the US dollar over the Rwandan dollar and what’s the difference between them. What is the reason that we pay exorbitant taxes?…
There are three ways I break down Bitcoin: 1) The technology component and protocol or the open source code that is being written; 2) The network, the energy that goes into maintaining the code; 3) The companies that are being built on Bitcoin.”
The industry has evolved since the release of the Bitcoin whitepaper in October of 2008, spawning thousands of companies in the digital currency space. Demirors says she’s personally invested in 180 of them.
“What makes Bitcoin valuable is that it’s money that doesn’t require an intermediary. You don’t need a bank to owe, hold, or transact with Bitcoin. People have been realizing that when you treat it like another asset, you’re destroying the value.”
Ripple’s Birla confirms that the San Francisco-based fintech, which purchased a $50-million stake in MoneyGram, is seeing real-world adoption. The company is integrating its technology with legacy players around the world to modernize the way money can move. Its platform can settle cross-border transactions, which typically take days, as quickly as information moves on the internet.
Birla calls Ripple the “Amazon of blockchain” powering the frictionless motion of money around the globe the same way the internet transformed the movement of data.
“The whole point of blockchain is that you’re removing the intermediary, whether that be the banks, or other financial institutions. If you can’t point to how you’re removing that intermediary from your business, you need to go back to the drawing board.”
He adds,
“I think Ripple will be really taking off in the next two years. The world order will be reshuffled using the blockchain technology. I think Asia will lead the pack.”
Tapscott says the real value of Bitcoin is its underlying technology.
“Blockchain is a lot more than a nifty new technology and it’s a lot more than Bitcoin…
Blockchain is a way to program scarcity in digital assets. It will impact financial services beyond the internet impact.”
Zuckerberg also tweeted about several other blockchain-based platforms in the space, including DentaCoin, Sardinecoin and Bananacoin, polling her followers on whether or not they like the value propositions of crypto-based business models for dentistry, sardines and bananas.
Bananacoin got a favorable reaction from 54% of respondents. Dentacoin scored 36.4% and Sardinecoin scored 27.7%
Walmart’s blockchain initiative on lettuce which uses the technology to pinpoint contaminated shipments across the supply chain scored the highest, with 90% of respondents giving it a thumbs up.
Featured Image: Shutterstock/Oleksandr_Delyk
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