Monica Long is well known by the Ripple community having been at Ripple since 2013. She is the senior vice president of marketing and is in charge of helping Ripple get its message to its targeted audience in simple and easy-to-understand concepts. Her journey in the cryptocurrency industry began in 2013 when she heard about Chris Larsen’s new venture and decided to give him a call and find out more. Chris had been her longtime friend, with the two having worked together at Prosper Marketplace, Chris’ previous startup which was the first peer-to-peer lending platform in the U.S.
In an interview with Meltem Demirors for the Leaders Series, Monica cited Ripple’s mission of removing unnecessary yet costly friction from global payments as one of the key reasons she was excited to join the Ripple team.
“International payments have earned the reputation of being slow, unreliable and expensive. In fact, they’re prohibitively expensive for entire segments of the population. If global payments are instant, reliable, easy and low-cost, they become so much more accessible to everyone — especially in underserved markets.”
Her biggest inspirations are big customer milestones that Ripple has achieved during her time here. One of the watershed moments was when Ripple’s first institutional customer went live in production and sent their first customer’s payments across the network. It was also a big milestone when the first institutional customer went live with payments through XRP.
Moving forward, interoperability between different systems will be critical to how the crypto industry shapes up, Monica observed. Ripple’s engineering team is hard at work on interoperability and the Interledger Protocol is testament to their commitment to enabling instant payments across any number of ledgers without failure.
“The blockchain and cryptocurrencies will be the technology drivers of a new industrial revolution,” Monica said in conclusion. The blockchain will change the world in the same way other major innovations like the cotton gin, the shipping container and the internet did.
“The most obvious implication is likely greater global commerce and financial inclusion. But there’ll be far-reaching progress and change we can’t even imagine today.”
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