Ripple’s CTO
David Schwartz is among the most influential computer programmers in the crypto verse. He’s the chief technology officer for Ripple, which means that he’s the man charged to keep that technology going.
Very few people in the world know cryptography and blockchain technology with his degree of expertise, and the chances are that nobody else in the world understands Ripple’s technology and the XRP cryptocurrency better than he does.
He recently gave an interview about Ripple and crypto, and he has interesting things to say about what could be in the cards for Ripple this year.
Decentralization
He started by saying that, the biggest change he’s seen in XRP recently has been the increase in decentralization. This has always been a contentious point because, since this is a blockchain created and ran by a private company, many hardcore blockchain fans have accused it of not being truly decentralized.
According to Mr. Schwartz, the current Ripple network is more decentralized than Bitcoin or Ethereum (which are still considered to be something of a golden standard for almost everything in the crypto verse).
The number of validators operated by Ripple has gone significantly down which is one of the reasons why it’s more advanced in terms of true decentralization than many other projects.
Proof of work vs. consensus
He further explained that the main difference between the XRP ledger and Bitcoin or Ethereum is in the proof-of-work method they use. Ripple uses consensus instead. That makes Ripple’s network lighter and faster without sacrificing any of the reliability it must have to keep the blockchain working.
And the proof is in the pudding. Completing an operation in the XRP ledger takes about five seconds while Bitcoin can take as long as an hour.
On prospects for the rest of the year, Mr. Schwartz commented that he’d like to see more use of Ripple’s decentralized exchange, which has been one of XRP’s uses since its inception in 2012.
The conversation between Mr. Katz and the interviewer was very short but very clear and substantial. They are both obviously very optimistic about the way in which XRP and the Ripple network are performing, and they don’t seem to have any reason to believe that it will keep getting better as time goes by.
XRP is currently ranked as the third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and it’s trading at $0.31887. It was the most profitable digital asset during 2017, which was a year that saw almost every single cryptocurrency reach very high prices.
Ripple has managed to create strategic partnerships with more than 200 banks, remittance services, and other financial institutions and they secure a new partner every week on average.
It’s one of the few digital assets that have a very clear use case (eliminating friction from international transfers), and even more rare, is that it’s achieved to create interest for cryptocurrencies in Wall Street and traditional financial institutions, which have been very skeptic (if not downright fearful) of all things crypto.
It’s always interesting to listen to Mr. Schwartz talking about the crypto verse in general and about Ripple in particular.
Image courtesy of Flickr.
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