Last week was interesting for the crypto currency XRP. The launch of xRapid and the onboarding of payment companies are driving the Ripple roadmap forward bit by bit.
Ripple is also in the media and in the mouths of prominent representatives. One can read the following quote on Breakermag.com:
The keynote speaker at Ripple’s Swell conference in San Francisco yesterday was none other than the 42nd president of the United States, Bill Clinton.
That’s right. Clinton 42nd President of the USA was the star guest at Ripple’s Swell conference in San Francisco.
The reason for the selection of Clinton as speaker is summarized in a quote from Ripple himself:
“At a time when groundbreaking technology and regulation were often on a collision course, President Clinton helped usher in a period of extreme growth and adoption of the internet, shaping what it is today.”
Of course, Clinton’s personality and reputation in general may also have confirmed his decision to bring him on board.
The feedback Clinton has given in the direction of blockchain technology is quite positive and provides an appeal to let things run their course. Overregulation is to be avoided in this way:
“This whole blockchain deal has the potential it does only because it is applicable across national borders, income groups,” he said. He then cautioned, “We could ruin it all by negative identity politics in economic and social policy—so you think about that. Take a little time, and just think about that, because your whole future and the kids that you either have or may someday have are dependent on that.”
[Click] You can read the whole article about Clintons speech over here. [Click]
Now the chief market strategist of Rapple – Cory Johnson – together with Mark Yarm has held an interview which offers more insights into the networking of Ripple and the American establishment.
In addition to the question of how the initiation of the cooperation with Clinton had behaved, the opinion of the Trump Administration was also asked. Without going into too much detail here, the general opinion seems to be positive:
When I started to meet with people in government and regulators, I had very low expectations. I have been truly amazed at the open-mindedness, number one. And number two, the smart questions, sometimes even tough questions. There’s clearly a lot of homework going on. The White House in particular seems to be thinking about what it means to have 80 percent of bitcoin mining taking place in China and a majority of Ether mining taking place in China. When you look at XRP, there is no mining, so from a foreign-control aspect or from an environmental aspect, XRP is a very different beast. And in conversations we’ve had with the administration, they seem to get that and think that might matter.
At least it can be said with certainty that there is a more intimate connection between the White House, regulators and Ripple with their XRP.
There is no precise answer to a more precise question as to who was picked up by politicians or regulators for the topic:
But we’re in regular talks throughout Washington, and we meet with regulators as well as politicians. We’ve got a whole team that’s devoted to doing that, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Our regulatory team, they jump on planes like their pants are on fire.
[Click] You can also read the entire second blog quoted here. [Click]
If you want to have a look at the whole blog, you will find some more side notes about the public appearance of Ripple. Also the future development will be discussed. With this quote I would like to close this article, too, without giving any opinion or rating:
We’ve definitely got big banks on the platform already—Standard Chartered; Santander, the largest bank in Spain; Itaú [Unibanco], the largest bank in Brazil. But if you travel in Asia or the Middle East, you see money-changing companies on every corner, and that’s because banks aren’t the way money moves in these places—it’s moved through companies that handle remittances. What we’re seeing is lots and lots of smaller companies—frankly ones that I never heard of before I started this job—signing up and using our software. It’s not going to be the big, incumbent players that say, “I want to fix the way my business works.” It’s going to the scrappy upstarts that say, “I want to steal market share by the truckload, not by the spoonful.”