San Francisco based Ripple is developing a network for faster
San Francisco based Ripple is developing a network for faster global financial payments, and CEO Brad Garlinghouse recently told CNBC that Bitcoin will not be the panacea people are hoping for it to be, in terms of being a global currency, saying Bitcoin will have a role in the future, but not one that will see it solve major problems.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Money 20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, Garlinghouse said,
“I think it’s not going to be the panacea that people once thought it would be, where it would solve all of these different kinds of problems … instead, you’re seeing specializations of different kind of ledgers, different kinds of blockchains.”
Clarifying that it isn’t a case of competition between currencies, he noted that XRP transactions are “a thousand times faster” than those of Bitcoin, which he described as “quite slow”, as is accepted by the world. At the time of the interview, the average BTC transaction was 42 minutes according to Blockchain.info, while XRP transactions take approximately four seconds, although it worth pointing out that Bitcoin’s trading volume is far greater than that of XRP as well.
“Well, I don’t really think about it as one versus the other. I mean, it’s actually unfortunate, I think, that there’s some people in this, the crypto space, the blockchain space — for them, it’s almost a holy war of one versus the other. I don’t look at that at all.”
Bitcoin’s transaction speeds, however, are a result of the use of blockchain technology which has not been scaled for a wider user base yet. Ripple transactions, on the other hand, are not carried out on a blockchain, but natively on the Ripple protocol instead.
In another recent interview with CNBC, Garlinghouse said that cryptocurrency prices are influenced by bitcoin, but that could soon change as people realize the differences between different digital coins.
While Ripple as a company is a separate entity from the XRP currency, 60% of the XRP supply is owned by the company, much of it by the Ripple founders themselves.