The Chief Market Strategist of Ripple, Cory Johnson sat down with the CEO of Ripple at their headquarters for an ask me anything session. In the interview, both of them discussed XRP market reports, Q1 discussion, new customers and a lot more.
Cory started off stating the importance of being proactive and addressing people regularly. ‘Transparency in an ecosystem, especially the one we are living in is probably the most important’, he noted.
Cory finds himself having to distinguish between XRP which the digital asset used by many and on the other side the business of Ripple making it a sellable software.
When asked about the highlights of the Q1, Brad says on a lighter note that hiring Cory Johnson was their top highlight while Cory responded:
“certainly that was, for me.”
On a serious note, he says they had all of Q1 were in their hands. The entire team of Ripple from across the globe were brought together under one roof in their headquarters where they walked through everything that kind of transpired and for Brad, it does start with customer traction.
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He quoted:
“We had an incredible quarter and there is no question about that. We signed more than 1 production contract per week in Q1.”
Cory added on:
“Internally it was really cool to see e-mails roll through, it is fascinating to watch the momentum build.”
He says that the momentum has been built surely and they are getting better at what they do or what they are articulating, and how their products work. But another one, the most important is adding nodes to the network.
He explained:
“The value of the network grows with the square of the number of nodes on the network – Metcalfe’s law.”
Lately, this kind of increment was significantly observed within the first quarter. They have signed partnerships with multiple banks like the biggest banks of Brazil and India – Banco do Brasil and IndusInd respectively, among few. Another example that got some attention is the addition of the Saudi Arabian monetary authority, the Central Bank as a customer of Ripple. They have also joined the Bank of England as a customer.
A Central Bank engaging with Ripple also has great secondary and tertiary impacts in working with the ecosystem throughout the middle east. This is more than just an approval, they got the connections on the rail and they see that Ripple is moving from an analog to digital nature in terms of cross-border payment flows.
Brad, talking about the customers says:
“We will continue to focus in solving problems for real customers and ripple remains the leader in real production enterprise use case in blockchain technology.”
Cory also mentioned that back when he joined, the number of customers were 190 and within few weeks it had increased to 225.
Brad focuses on scaling the organization and he highlights the point:
“At the end of the day success is measured in volume and how happy the customers are and how well we solved and addressed their problems reducing friction and costs while increasing the speed for cross-border payments problem.”
Brad claimed that few big banks which were leaning towards Ripple’s xCurrent and their rulebook are in the process of finalizing.
About xRapid:
Brad illustrated that some issues faced by the financial institutions about how relationships and currency options can be decided.He says that xRapid solves that problem with liquidity. They have signed and announced 6 pilot customers additionally in xRapid during Q1 including Western Union, Cambridge FX, and others.
He says that it is surprising how global commerce and global transactions continue to increase at a nice clip on a year-on-year basis. Correspondent banking, the nature of how cross-border transactions occur, has seen a dip in the figures by 50% over the last 10 years which is fascinating according to his opinion because the cost supporting the correspondent bank relationships are significant.
Cory mentioned amidst the explanation saying:
“It would be fascinating if there wasn’t global growth and if we were in a recession to be fascinating.”
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