Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, about the potential of cryptocurrencies to improve the global economy. At a roundtable discussion entitled “The Future of Cryptographic Money,” Garlinghouse mentioned that blockchain technology is highly likely to improve the conditions under which social, banking, and industrial relationships operate:
“There is an opportunity to fundamentally rewire how modern financial infrastructure works in the pre-funding. You have about $10 trillion pre-funded to banks around the world in order to enable cross-border payments. If you could take advantage of crypto liquidity to fund real-time payments, you could actually take that $10 trillion and use it for other purposes, which is great for society. It’s great for banking. It’s great for industry. So that’s what we’re trying to rewire. We’re lucky to now have about 200 banks that have signed up. We’ve got a long way to go”
Garlinghouse also pointed out that blockchain technology has made little progress in terms of culture. He also stressed that some industry chaos has been repeatedly reported by the media, so that many people think that the cryptocurrency is very bad. In order to promote the popularity of cryptocurrency, this view needs to be changed:
“I think many people in the world – not just regulators – they hear the word ‘crypto’ and their brain goes immediately to Silk Road and illicit, illegal activities. And you have to kind of bring them up to speed on real use cases and real utility that’s actually good for governments, good for banks, that can be leveraged.”
In addition, Garlinghouse also mentioned Bitcoin. He said that due to the characteristics of Bitcoin itself, its future is more likely to become a digital hedging product than a real currency.
Many of the experts who participated in this World Economic Forum are not optimistic about Bitcoin, and even think that Bitcoin will return to zero. To this end, Garlinghouse revealed that he also holds Bitcoin, and Bitcoin cannot be zeroed:
“If you take Bitcoin as it exists today as a static thing, the scalability problems and proof of work as a model have some real significant limitations. There’s lots of people trying to improve that. Maybe they’ll be successful. Maybe they won’t. I’m not prepared to say Bitcoin goes to zero. I still own Bitcoin partly because, as Glen describes, it may become just a store of value.
However, at Ripple, we build upon a technology called XRP because it’s extremely scalable as compared to Bitcoin. It’s extremely low-cost and extremely fast relative to how Bitcoin works.”
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