Brad Garlinghouse on the Crypto Market’s Future

On September 1, Ripple’s Chief Executive Officer, Brad Garlinghouse was able to speak with Stanford Legal and discussed some of the most pertinent issues regarding the crypto industry. The interview’s focus is to get his opinion regarding the regulatory aspect of digital currencies.

He discussed that illegal transactions using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is a normal progression for the market. He mentioned that eventually, people are going to realize its benefits and digital currencies will then be part of society in general.

He also discussed Ripple’s role in the crypto space. He mentioned that the origin of cryptocurrencies were from ideas of decentralization without any influence of governments. He also discussed that anonymity is at the center of this idea.

He mentioned “that’s in some ways for what the business ripple is building, that’s a frustrating thing because it takes time and education to explain, there’s a lot of misinformation. There real-world use cases as we talked about earlier with its payment settlement cross-border or security settlement where you can use these techniques to have real-world positive benefits on economies, on consumer experience, business experience”.

However, he discussed that anonymity is a point of concern in the niche. He shared his idea regarding KYC (Know-Your-Customer) and mentioned that this is a positive procedure in regulating cryptocurrencies.

However, in terms of the progression of mass adoption, Ripple’s CEO isn’t exactly optimistic regarding its near future. He mentioned that “I don’t think we’re going to be buying coffee at Starbucks with Bitcoin or XRP anytime soon. I think we’ve got to ask ourselves: What problem is that solving? You were talking about paying for the day spa bill and how you do that, but I think in some ways the friction – fiat currency, the US dollar in this case works pretty well, and so we need to make sure it’s better than that before we talk about it as a currency…”.

Ripple’s Competition

Ripple is considered the leader in cross-border transactions. It has worked with banks and even partnered with Western Union. However, Ripple received a bad review from Western Union. Western Union mentioned that it Ripple’s prdouct really didn’t help them lower their cost.

Stellar is currently working with tech giant IBM looking to compete with Ripple’s products. Stellar’s product is dubbed as “World Wire”. It offers basically the same things as Ripple. It offers fast transactions at a low cost. However, the significant difference between Ripple’s product and that of Stellar is that IBM targets financial institutions as 97% of its market.

90% of the total credit card settlements are handled by IBM. This could be a great opportunity for Stellar to boost its adoption. According to IBM, “Faster payment processing (simultaneous clearing and settlement), lower costs, increased efficiency and simplified payment and asset type form of transaction” are things that they are going to bring to the table with Stellar.

IBM also mentioned that “With 97% of the world’s largest banks as clients of IBM there remains little doubt that their new flagship payments system won’t be heavily advertised to their existing customer and client base”.

Ripple Dealing with Lawsuits

Aside from competition, Ripple also has to deal with lawsuits. Since Bitcoin and Ethereum were declared as commodities, XRP remains on a limbo. The primary reason for this is that Ripple has dealt with multiple lawsuits claiming that XRP is a security.