CTO of Ripple, David Schwartz recently held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session where Ripple community had the opportunity to ask him questions via TNW Answers. During the session, Schwartz shared interesting insights into strategic developments of xRapid as well as the transfer of value through XRP.
xRapid is one of the main three products offered by Ripple which is still in beta testing with expected final release by the end of this year. While asked about current development process of xRapid, Schwartz answered: “our goal is to have xRapid out of beta by the end of the year. We’re really excited about the recent pilot results showing 40% to 70% savings compared to what financial institutions normally pay expensive foreign exchange providers”.
Another interesting insight on the recent major partnership with three exchangers which support XRP was inquired by the community, to which the CTO commented: “for xRapid to work, there has to be sufficient liquidity between XRP and the local fiat currency to permit fiat currency to be bought and sold as needed. A lot of this liquidity is already being provided organically by market makers… xRapid will just mean that instead of (probably) trading almost exclusively with speculators, market makers will increasing trade with market takers trying to source liquidity through XRP. If needed, Ripple would consider employing third party market makers to provide additional liquidity were existing market making insufficient”.
While talking about decentralised payment systems, Schwartz stated that this method is cheap, simple, and fast, with the caveat that it is not guaranteed that the entire payment will be made. He concluded this section by saying: “the hope is that we can design systems that fix that problem at higher levels and keep the money flow layers as simple as possible – kind of the opposite of lightning’s approach”.
Full answers of the session are available here.
