Although Ripple has been around since 2012, it and the XRP Ledger are doubling down on its global payments journey. At the same time, it’s also aiming to become the go-to enterprise infrastructure provider, the company’s president, Monica Long, said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
Distinct from the Ripple network and protocol, the XRP Ledger is a decentralized public ledger with an open source code base that anyone can contribute to or use, Long said. And there are thousands of developers globally who do, she added.
“The original creators of the ledger saw that this could be a modern system for value movement that is as fast and as free as email,” Long said. “So instead of the analogy of the post office versus email we’ve got the banking system today versus what you can achieve on a blockchain with a decentralized exchange.”
When the ledger first launched in 2012, it imagined it as a version of bitcoin that would achieve faster confirmation times with a lower cost system, Long said. “The developers thought of blockchain and a public ledger as a great way to represent and move and transact value all around the world.”
Blockchains, by default, are transparent through on-chain data, which shows a transaction’s journey, from beginning to end.
“Foreign exchange is pretty concentrated in terms of the players who actually have enough capital to provide liquidity for those transactions,” Long said. “And so when you have a lot of concentration, you have a lack of competitiveness for the pricing.”