The vice president of RippleX James Wallis says Ripple is currently working with central banks on developing digital currencies.
In a new interview on the Voice of FinTech podcast, Wallis outlines Ripple’s role in the minting of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), emphasizing that the company is not trying to uproot existing financial structures, but is rather trying to improve upon systems that are already in place.
“We are building and implementing technology, we’re not trying to disintermediate the existing financial system. We’re trying to make it better. What we’re really trying to do is bring our technology and our expertise to the enterprise world.”
The RippleX VP notes that there are three ways in which the digital payments company will help central banks develop these currencies, the first of which is leveraging its core ledger technology.
“Specifically around CBDCs there are really three things that we’re trying to do. One is the core ledger… the technology that is used to mint or create the CBDCs and then distribute it and track the transactions on the systems of record, on the blockchain. And we have a clear view that a private instance of an existing decentralized ledger is a good way to go.
And what I mean by that is you take all the really robust experience of an open-source project that’s built a ledger that’s been running for multiple years, like the XRP Ledger, for example, and then you create a version that is a bit more centrally controlled that a central bank could be comfortable with running and they will still be able to control their monetary policy and so forth.”
Wallis says Ripple is also working with central banks to help achieve interoperability between various assets like digital dollars, stablecoins and cryptocurrencies.
Wallis says that the third element of the company’s work on CBDCs centers around developing a suitable neutral bridge asset, “something like XRP,” to help extend the capabilities of the burgeoning CBDC network.
“We’re working with central banks to build out these capabilities that I mentioned, and the solution will be a mixture of open-source technology, maybe some elements from RippleNet down the road – it’s still a little early to say exactly.”
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