Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse believes XRP may prove to be the ideal solution for central banks looking to usher their currency into the digital age.
In a new interview on The Scoop podcast, Garlinghouse says that as central banks begin to launch their own currencies, sourcing liquidity and compatibility between currencies could be challenging.
That, he says, is why Ripple is pushing XRP as a bridge asset to power cross-border transactions and exchange one currency for another.
“The whole point of XRP in our context is to be a bridge asset. So if you’re using a US dollar stablecoin, you still need to get to a Brazilian Real stablecoin or Australian stablecoin.
The point [of Ripple’s efforts] is to enable a lot of efficiency and liquidity between XRP and the US dollar, and XRP and the Australian dollar. You just have to worry about one bridge as opposed to liquidity between every pair. So just using stablecoins doesn’t really solve the problem that XRP is solving. XRP as an extremely efficient, extremely scalable blockchain, is ideally suitable for that.”
In addition, he says Ripple is exploring more ways to branch out of the cross-border payments realm in the future.
“We will certainly enter other vertical markets and we won’t just be a cross-border payments solution… We want to help customers grow and scale their business. On-Demand Liquidity does that. Line of Credit does that. We will certainly look at verticals and maybe it’s insurance. Maybe it’s trade finance.
There are lots of other examples where blockchain technologies can be brought to bear to reduce the friction and improve the efficiencies of those transactions.”
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