Ripple In Central Banking
Today at The Bangkok Fintech Fair one of the Ripple employees stated during the panel discussion that Ripple was working with 40-50 central banks around the world, which accounts for roughly 20% of the countries that exist. Although the price of XRP was not affected by the slightest of this incredible piece of information, this news actually goes much deeper than just what the Ripple employee said.
Central banks typically have influence on the rest of the banks that reside in that country, because central banks are the ones that dictate interest rates, implement government monetary policy, issue currency, and supervise the commercial banking system of that country. Essentially, central banks are the lead dog of the countries financial system so any decision they make for their own bank could cause other banks to make the same decision as the central bank. For example, let's say the federal reserve decides to adopt the Ripple technology xRapid and uses XRP in payment flows to cut costs and create faster transaction speeds. This gives off a signal to the rest of the banks in the United States that a new technology approved by the federal reserve is out and is saving the central bank money. Therefore this makes the commercial bank feel safe and secure by adopting the technology because it is used by the 'lead dog' of the banks.
What is brilliant by Ripple is that by targeting one central bank they are essentially indirectly targeting the rest of the banks that reside in that country. So by targeting 40-50 banks they are actually targeting thousands of potential clients by working with the central banks.
Costs them less time but delivers more results.
XRP To Be Base Currency On Exchanges
Recently listed on the Ripple website under the careers section, is a position for XRP Markets Retail Infrastructure Manager. Here are the tasks of this position.
- Work to get new XRP listings on digital asset exchanges
- Develop strong relationships with existing exchanges to support XRP as a base currency
- Partner with existing and prospective wallet providers
- Develop XRP support on brokerage and chat platforms
- Work with our product, marketing, and engineering teams to ensure XRP support for the retail ecosystem
The most exciting aspect that I find with this position is the fact that they not only want to add XRP to additional exchanges to build liquidity, but also work with exchanges that already have XRP, but to form it into a base currency for the exchange (they would do this by adding more XRP pairs for both fiat and digital currency). This would definitely help XRP decouple from Bitcoin, and have the cryptocurrency community see that XRP has a great personal use case, and builds even more liquidity for the XRP ecosystem at the same time.
It makes sense for XRP to be a base currency for any exchange because of the instantaneous transaction speed that costs fractions of a cent. Instead of waiting on miners to mine a block that takes 20 minutes and pay them 3$ to do so. You can get an instantaneous transaction for .0004$. Recently, I moved my XRP off of an exchange (finally) and into a hardware wallet, it costed me .04 XRP and happened within 30 seconds(XRP transaction time is 3-4 seconds but took the exchanges 20 seconds to confirm the transaction and then send it). When something sounds to good to be true it usually is but, in this case it isn't. I experienced the use case first hand.
Cobalt Network
Now if a 3-4 second transactions wasn't fast enough. The cobalt network that is currently being worked on by Ripple brings down the transaction time to 1 second, and that isn't the only great benefit to cobalt. Cobalt also creates a more secure network, and further decentralizes the ledger. Coincidentally, part of the Coinbase listing criteria for new coins is that it must be decentralized. But i'll leave up to you to debate that with the community.
Conclusion
Although the price is not appealing to us holders. The progress is. Remember that the price of XRP right now is because it's being treated like a cryptocurrency tethered to Bitcoin fluctuation, rather than a digital asset that has massive potential to be the only globally adopted cryptocurrency within the financial system.
The price of XRP right now does not dictate its value 3-5 years from now.
Sources
2.https://ripple.com/company/careers/all-jobs/#xrp-markets-retail-infrastructure-manager
3.https://oracletimes.com/ripple-xrp-everything-comes-after-cobalt-including-1-second-transmissions/