Ripple’s Chief Market Strategist, Cory Johnson, who joined the company on 9 March 2018, in an interview with Yahoo Finance (as part of the “Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit: Crypto”) on Thursday, made several interesting comments about Ripple the company, the XRP token, xCurrent, and xRapid. Here, we bring you some of the highlights from this wide-ranging “Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit: Crypto”.

Ripple the Company vs. XRP the Token

  • “It is endlessly frustrating to me that people are unable to distinguish the fact that XRP and Ripple are separate things.”
  • “I mean, no-one calls ExxonMobil “oil”; there’s oil and there’s ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil has a vested interest in seeing that oil is successful, but it doesn’t mean that it is the same thing.”
  • “We are an enterprise software company for financial institutions.”

Successes of Ripple During 2018

  • “We had the best 1st quarter the company has ever had.”
  • “We signed more deals, we got more companies into production… we signed all kinds of companies… remittance companies, banks, financial institutions all over the world… deals coming probably every six days instead of every six weeks like a year ago… and yet XRP had the worst quarter we’ve ever had… So I would argue that they are very much separated.”

How Does Ripple Convince Banks to Sign Up?

  • “We are already there. We have products in the marketplace. We have got… over 100 financial institutions using our software right now… we have moved over a billion dollars across the Ripple network.”
  • “Our competition is this banking consortium that came together in 1973… It’s called SWIFT… You know what it isn’t? It is not ‘swift’! It takes 3-5 days to move money… It’s one-dimensional messaging… It has about a 4% error rate… You send a message to move money, and then you wait, and maybe you get something back… It’s more akin to a homing pigeon than a text message or email.”
  • “The results we hear back are enormously positive.” 

Why Does the Ripple Ecosystem Excite the XRP HODLers So Much?

  • “I think that XRP is, in some ways, Crypto 2.0.”
  • “Bitcoin may be the Napster of this technology, where it opened our eyes to what is possible, but the failings of the technology also became apparent.”
  • “The creators of XRP looked at the possibilities of Bitcoin, and said ‘Wow, this could be awesome, but this could fall on its face. And so they created something that was a 2.0, a solution to a lot f the problems for Bitcoin. And they did that before they had the imagination of a use case.”

Why There Is So Much FUD Around XRP

  • “Because people who understand it and who have made a bet somewhere, want to see the other things fail.”
  • “I think there are Bitcoin maximalists who hate XRP because it is not Bitcoin.”
  • “I there are ether holders who hate XRP because hold ether.”
  • “I think there are bloggers and wanna-be journalists… [who are] biased because they are holding some of these assets and not the others, and by definition, that puts them in a place where they can’t honestly divorce themselves from hoping something is successful and something else isn’t.”

Banks Adoption of xCurrent and xRapid

  • “One of clever things that Ripple did long before I arrived was to create some software that instead of espousing the virtues of anarchy, said that we are creating software for banks that sits behind the bank’s firewalls… it’s just that the software sits underneath their system, and moves things faster, and that starts to get banks comfortable with our xCurrent product. It’s simply a messaging product, doesn’t use XRP or crypto at all, and I think that the banks can then start to get comfortable with ‘Oh wow, how can we take this to the next level’, and then maybe they start to use our xRapid product and that will engage them in the world of XRP.”

 

Yahoo Finance has made available on YouTube the full video recording of this highly entertaining interview.