One thing is for sure; Ripple seems to have a plan for becoming one of the leading cryptocurrencies of the future. Connecting with all the banks is just a means to an end. Here is how it is all likely to go down.
“Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole industry,” says Peter Thiel, an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal. Thiel’s wise statement comes from his book, Zero to One, published in September 2014, and written by Thiel and a student Blake Masters.
This particular quote is followed by an explanation of how PayPal managed to go big. The company did not want to acquire random users. Instead, they targeted those who would be the most valuable to them — those who would start depending on it. Their first goal was to focus on emigrants who left their home countries to work abroad and send money home.
Before PayPal, they depended on Western Union to do so. PayPal made it effortless, but the transactions were too infrequent, as Thiel explains. The company decided to take a different approach, which is why they started targeting eBay ‘PowerSellers,’ professional vendors who sold and bought goods on eBay auction marketplace. Soon enough, transactions surged, and PayPal became THE payments platform for eBay.
How do XRP and Ripple fit in?
What does this have to do with Ripple and XRP? Looking closely at what Ripple had been doing with the banks, it is clear that the company is making pretty much the same move when it comes to bringing cryptocurrencies to banks.
Similarly to Thiel’s advice not to try to acquire random users, Ripple opted to target a smaller niche market segment. Bitcoin, for example, has no target audience, apart from people, in general. Its use cases and its brand have made it big, but for anyone else to come out of Bitcoin’s shadow, they must become the primary solution in a specific niche market segment, as PayPal did with eBay.
In this case, Ripple is PayPal, and traditional banks are eBay. The longer we observe the two firms’ methods, the more parallels emerge, which leads to an important conclusion — that Ripple aims at a much bigger picture than most other cryptocurrencies.
Most other coins just want to be available to anyone and everyone at the same time, which is too broad, too general. Ripple and XRP aim at banks and their already-established massive user base, which is not ready to shift to widespread cryptocurrencies.
With XRP in place, they could just keep going to the bank and make use of a better way of sending money internationally, without really having to understand the technology behind it. This is what is likely to make Ripple (XRP) big, even though the crypto community has several other coins that might be doing the same thing in a more decentralized way.
This, in turn, leads to another conclusion, which is that XRP might become for the crypto space what PayPal became for traditional finance industry. In other words, Ripple (XRP) will see a major increase in use and value at some point, which might be a useful hint to long-term investors and HODLers.
Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.
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