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XRP Community Day - Americas
Recorded: Feb. 11, 2026 Duration: 2:56:00Space Recording
Short Summary
The XRP community is witnessing significant developments with the introduction of new leadership at the XRPL Foundation, strategic partnerships, and a focus on enhancing yield opportunities. As the ecosystem grows, initiatives like the lending protocol and community engagement efforts are set to drive adoption and innovation in the blockchain space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hello everyone. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. so so
. do
Oh so Thank you. Hello. Hello, hello, soundcheck. Can I get a reaction to see if you can hear me, please?
Yes, I can hear you, David.
All good.
That's perfect. Hi, everyone. Happy XRP Community Day. Welcome. So welcome, everyone. Welcome to this very special community session.
I'm David Pschiri.
I'm the president of XRPL Commons, calling in from Paris.
And joining me today is Fabio Marzella, co-founder
and manager of the XaoDAO.
Hi, Fabio.
Fabio Marzella- Good morning, all.
Good evening. I know it's early for you, late for me, and normal time for the US.
We're kicking off this XRP Community Day Americas.
Very excited to be the first one speaking on these sessions.
And today we have a very important news to break.
We, Fabio and I, along with the other board members
of the XRPL Foundation,
representing Ripple and XRPL Labs,
we are here today to introduce our new executive director.
We'll get... you
we lost you david if you could still hear us Am I lagging a bit?
Yes, you're back now, David.
Okay.
So, I'll go back from the beginning because I'm not sure.
I think I got cut before reaching my high point.
But in a nutshell, I think the XNPL Foundation is an important organization for the ecosystem.
It plays an important role. And its mission is really ensuring
that the protocol remains open, decentralized, transparent,
and on top of it, accessible to all.
And it is the steward of the network.
It supports the core developers, the infrastructure,
and the broader ecosystem.
And 14 months ago, we created this new entity. We announced at Apex that
the XRPL Foundation was kicking off, but most of all, it was looking for its executive director.
And we have found him. Brett Moline, super, super happy to have you join us. Brett, you're
a tech veteran. You're an XRPL node operator.
You're a long, long-time community member.
So, you know, I think you're the best one to introduce yourself.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself, about your journey
with the XRPL community and the protocol?
And let's kick this conversation off.
Yeah, thank you, David and Fabio and Visa and David Schwartz,
members of the board, for picking me for this position.
I can't tell you, you know, how seriously I take this position
and how much I want to give back to the community. So again,
thanks to all of you for trusting me with this. Almost to the day, 11 years ago,
I started at Ripple, hired by Bob Way and was lucky enough to come to the offices in San Francisco and have David Schwartz and Bob and
Stephan Thomas and Arthur Brito teach me about blockchain, teach me about the XRPL,
write all over my desk in markers. It was an incredible time and I'm so fortunate to have lived through that. And why I've been behind the scenes, it is this technology
that's, you know, served me over the past 11 years. And I do think it's, you know, time for
me to give back and that stewardship that you mentioned. And I'm very excited to do that.
Well, this is pretty cool to have you.
You know, we couldn't be happier to have your experience and your dedication and your enthusiasm to guide the foundation.
And, you know, we we've seen several people for this position and it's very clear that
your roots in the ecosystem run very deep, that you have the passion for it.
And so with Fabio, my other, my co-board member today,
we have a few questions to, you know, from the board,
but also from the community.
I think we're going to take this session
to explore a bit your vision, your roadmap,
and I will let Fabio start.
Thank you, David.
Brett, again, congratulations and welcome. So I guess the
biggest questions that the community has probably been waiting for is that now that we've got an
executive director what are your top priorities and let's say over the next six to twelve months with mission yeah so i'll start at a i'll start at a high i'll start at a high level
fabio um you know first off it's the stability the availability and the evolution of the xrpl
ledger you know at a very high level that's what i'm here for. And, you know, in the last session, if anyone was on the EMEA session and in the rest of this session and in the APAC session, you're going to hear from all these people building on the XRP ledger.
And I want to make sure that that foundation is there for them to build on.
And that foundation needs to be secure.
It needs to be available when you need it.
And we also want it to be here in 100, 200 years. And at a high level, that's what I'm here to accomplish. You're probably going to
hear that quite a bit from me. How do I start doing that? I think I start doing that by building
a team, a team of the best people from the community in each of those areas.
And we've been, you know, with the board, we've been building a team or trying to recruit a team.
So you should see some announcements from me soon. I think the people you should look for as a director of community to interact with this incredible,
to interact with this incredible group,
director of technology, director of operations.
With those people, I think we can establish the groundwork,
the foundation for all the builders out there.
Very interesting.
Some names will follow on, I hope.
So that's at a very high level can you dig maybe a little in the more micro level yeah so it you know
there's obviously I've been in in this environment for a long time, and there's some things that myself and the board want to accomplish.
I think most importantly is transparency.
And right now, we have a lot of people, a lot of great people doing a lot of good work, but that work isn't really shared. People don't know what's
going on. And, you know, I've actually worked at organizations where there were these super
people who did a lot of work and then they leave the organization and don't document things and
there's a vacuum. And I want to make sure that that doesn't happen with the XRP ledger. We have, I'm not alone.
There's, there's a large group of people with over a decade of knowledge on the XRP ledger.
And I'm thinking about the future and I want to get that knowledge. I want to document it.
I want to share it. So the first step is documenting what we have now and then getting input. I think
that's something that's been missing.
You know, I'm getting paid full time to listen to this community,
the people that are on the people that are on this call.
So it's a time of absorbing, absorbing that information.
And then, you know, working with the community to decide what we do.
You know, real easy.
I think there's processes that I want, you know, very micro level,
there's processes, I wanna get those up on GitHub,
you know, so you can, everyone in this call
can see what the organization is doing.
I'll let you ask some more questions here, David, sorry.
Yeah, sure, I think, you know, you're spot on,
the thing you're mentioning about listening to
the community sharing information uh there's been a a huge call for transparency uh from from
major community members uh so you know we're here to answer what we've done for the last
six seven months was really building with Brett a strategy for the
years to come, making sure that the foundation has the resources, the talents that it needs to
operate. So this was exactly what we were missing before. We had an entity, but it was basically an
empty shell with a governance and a board, but the board was trying not to be too much operational.
and a board but the board was trying not to be too much operational and so now that we have
brett on board and a team coming up we'll be able to to deploy the whole roadmap for the foundation
and for the community um so you know beyond the process and everything um can you maybe take an
example of what the foundation will do in regards to, for instance, core development?
You know, we touched recently on specifications and things like that.
Yeah. So, you know, it's very important to have documentation of the protocol.
And I know this isn't the most exciting thing in the world to everybody.
But especially in this world of AI, you need to be able to feed into AI context so it can
make its decisions.
And having accurate context is incredibly important.
Recently, we partnered with a company called Common Prefix to document the payment engine of the XRP ledger.
And that was received incredibly well by the community.
In essence, we've needed this for a long time.
It helps us build.
And with that knowledge, we can bring on more builders to the core protocol.
And they can understand that protocol better,
and they can build better code.
Even our security auditors are taking that information
and putting it into their processes.
So the foundation is going to sponsor more of that,
continuing the specification of the XRPL protocol
and maintaining that.
So when something changes,
those specifications are continuously updated
and there's a process in place for keeping them updated.
So again, not the most exciting thing,
but it's that documentation
and then sharing that documentation
that empowers our core developers
and will grow the talent set across those core developers?
Well, if you ask me, I think it's very interesting to know that there is an entity with people in it that are packing knowledge and sharing knowledge.
I think for the longest time, this knowledge was in the head of a handful of people.
And so that is that is definitely a risk for an ecosystem
to rely on a few talents.
We have amazing talents, but the talents, they come, they go.
We hope that the foundation will be sort of a beacon
for creating this Bible of documentation.
The xrpl.org documentation is already amazing,
but building up on top of that and continuing to improve it
will be instrumental in your success.
I'm really looking forward to that.
We had a number of questions from the ecosystem
asking the difference between the foundation and xrpl commons.
And so I think it's interesting if we talk about our visions
and how these two entities will live side by side
without overlapping to each other.
Maybe I'll kick off with a few things that Commons is doing
and then what the foundation can do later on.
So at Commons, we have a mission that
is creating the conditions of success for builders,
whether they're developers, entrepreneurs, researchers, corporate innovators.
And when we say creating the conditions of success,
it's really trying to be the invisible hand to connect people to opportunities in the ecosystem.
Trying to create career paths so we have developers who can sustain a career in the XMPL ecosystem.
So the project that we run at Commons are an incubator, training programs for developers,
hosting meetups, hosting hackathons.
We're trying to be the builder ecosystem operating system.
We try to onboard developers that are building on the XMPLedger, companies that are going to build using the example ledger.
I think the fine line with the foundation is the foundation is in charge of the protocol and of the community of developers, infrastructure operators that are managing, operating, maintaining the protocol itself. So let's say the foundation is the protocol
and we're at Commons, we're on top of the protocol.
And so a question that came last year,
we were running at Commons a bootcamp for core developers.
And we trained for three weeks, a number of people
who came just to learn about how can they contribute
to the XRPL protocol. I think for instance this type of
programs will transition over to the foundation as soon as there's a team
that is formed there that can take over but you know that's that's one of the
examples you know at Commons will also contribute to the infrastructure and the grants for the builders.
I think this type of things, you know,
contributing to the infrastructure
is just the role of any entity in the ecosystem.
Everyone should contribute if they have the knowledge
and the resources too.
And the grants, for instance, I think, you know,
Commons will focus on giving out grants to builders launching projects,
whereas the foundation will focus on giving out grants to people
keeping the protocol up to date and running.
Anything you wanted to add, Brett?
No, I mean, I think that's, you know know i think that's incredible david and and you know
the word foundation is is critical here right the foundation is is is really the bottom is really
that bottom layer that commons and its developers are are building on top of and so that includes
the infrastructure you know organizing organizing upgrades know, talking with the community about the best hardware to run the protocol on the governance, the governance of of the system and then that core protocol into the next century, the evolution of that core protocol. So not just
keep the lights on, but also where are we going to go next with that core protocol,
which is, you know, an incredibly exciting area. You know, there's some low-lying fruit there,
you know, things like increasing system requirements that can help us to bring up
the capacity of the network again that's my goal is to make that foundation strong for for everybody
else on this call i think we can also maybe explore how the dow will play a role. The DAO is a founding member of the foundation.
And from its inception, the conversation with the DAO
was trying to give a voice of the users
at the foundation level.
Fabio, do you want to expand a bit on that?
Yeah, thank you, David.
Yes, definitely.
So yeah, just a quick touch on what the DAO actually
is and why it would matter to the community. So really simply the ZAODAO exists to give a community
a voice and my role on the foundation is basically to take ZAODAO members into that room and make sure that part of the decision has been made.
When we talked about voting, and it's not my vote, through the DAO we come together,
we discuss things, we put proposal forwards and we vote as a community.
Once we landed on a position on whatever project or positions we want to take that goes forward as one clear and unified
view that reflects what the DAO or the Zao DAO members want. So the idea is pretty straightforward,
you know, there's lots of voices coming together as one, keeping governance open, fair, and I guess it will align with the broader ecosystem.
So at the moment we are looking, the ZaoDao is pointing towards the 1000 members.
As soon as that task is arrived and achieved, the proposal windows opens for the members to start lodging proposals.
And we'll take it from there.
So I'll just entice every listener
and every XRP holder to go to our Zalda webpage
and have a look at it, have a read of it.
And yeah, keep this thing going and moving forward.
That's fantastic, Fabio. It really helps me with a challenge of taking leadership of a decentralized organization
and how do you show leadership and also keep the network decentralized.
So I think this board and the DAO being on that board is an important way of doing that.
And thanks a lot for your work and your contributions.
Thank you, Brent.
I think, you know, one other thing I want to mention before this session was over, there has been some work going on in the background by the foundation that we didn't get to mention.
I can't really take credit for this as I just joined.
It was more David was much more involved with this and the board.
But there is a refresh to XRPL.org that we are pushing out.
And I will share a link with that for this group in Twitter after this session and we should
have a little poll for you to take and give your input on that. And so the site has been refreshed
and it looks absolutely amazing. But as the executive director of the foundation, I do think it's that substance behind the website.
When you click on those links, that is, you know, really my responsibility and the responsibility of the leadership team that I'm bringing in.
So, you know, the site looks incredible.
It shows a commitment to promoting and marketing the XRP ledger.
And then it's my team really needs to have great content
behind those links that you're looking at.
Sorry, David, you're breaking up on us.
So I just started talking.
No problem.
The foundation will share a preview of what XRP.org will look like.
It's not yet live, but the team has been hard at work.
Kudos to people at RippleX that have been working on that,
from our marketing team.
Everyone has been contributing from all the board members,
companies to have a fresh look on xrfield.org.
I think we're almost at time.
What I want to convey here is the idea that the foundation is now operational.
Until now, we had a boat.
Now we have an engine on the boat, and we're going to go full speed with it.
And so expect more communication from the foundation very soon.
Expect a two-way channel of communication
where you will be able to engage with the foundation.
Brett, I think, is the most personable guy in the ecosystem.
You can talk to Brett.
And so I encourage you to start conversations with him.
So thank you, everyone, for joining.
I know it was a big news. If you want to hear more
about the foundation, there will be several announcements coming up on the foundation's
X account, XRPLF. You can follow also the XAODAO at XAODAO LLC. And if you want to know
more about XRPL Commons in our program, you can follow us example underscore comments on X2. And so my last invitation would be for everyone who wants to
be in Paris, we will be in Paris for the Paris Blockchain Week. We organize an example zone
Paris on April 14th for example builders. So if you're building on the XRPL
and you're planning to attend the Paris Blockchain Week,
make sure you register.
We will share the Luma link later on.
And next up, stay tuned for the next session coming up
about XRPL features, what's live, what's next.
We have our core developers joining.
I see them.
Hi, Mayuka.
And so we'll be speaking about the future of the XRPL
and its future.
Thanks, everyone.
It was an amazing session here by Dave Buccieri, Fabio,
and Brett about the new leadership at the XRPL Foundation.
So definitely follow the people here on stage to keep up with further updates.
And this leads us to the next session, which is about XRP features,
what is upcoming, what is next, with amazing people at Ripple X and, of course, Krippenwriter.
Let me first say hi to you all.
Hey, all right.
How's it going?
Hi, Bert.
Hey, Bert.
Hey, Bert.
Hey, there.
Hey, amazing.
It's like a group of friends already here joining to have that amazing conversation.
Jazzy's also on stage, I believe.
Jazzy?
Hey, Bert.
How's it going?
Great.
Amazing.
Well, yeah, we're going to start with this session here.
To start with, first, I want to give, like, sort of, just very briefly an introduction to each one of you.
And then, Kripp, you can also do that for yourself.
We have Mayuka, which is staff RippleX engineer.
She did a bunch of research and amendment work.
You know her from X, very active in the community,
involved with everybody here.
And we have also Ayo, who is head of engineering at RippleX.
And I had the pleasure to have last year an end of year space with him which was
amazing so great to see him here on the stage as well and we have an OG
actually as well and ripple OG which is Jazzy coming from the product ahead of
product at ripple X and did a bunch of DeFi, you guys remember with their AMM. You have seen her posts and also her takes around it.
So with these three guests, we have also Crippenwriter.
Hey, guys.
For people that don't know me, I do education on X mostly,
and also, which is pretty new,
I do a show that is called Crippenwriter TV with that, actually,
where we talk about xrp ledger
mainly and xrp and the whole ecosystem which is basically everything which we care about also
right now about the institutional defy roadmap that got released just a few days ago and on this On this, Jesse, just straight up, let's jump into this.
Why do we care about FX payments, tokenized collateral, and credit right now?
What are we solving with these new use cases?
Yeah, definitely.
Thanks, Krippen, and thanks for having us excited to be here and to chat about this. So to take a step back, I mean, we're really looking at the intersection of two main areas.
The first is where there are serious problems in finance, particularly institutional finance, that result in inefficiencies or unequal access or, you know, trapped balance sheet today. And also the second area is where there are clear
technical advantages of blockchain technology, particularly the XRP ledger. So we know the XRPL
is fast and cheap. There's other clear advantages around, you know, how the features work being built
at the protocol layer rather than a smart contract level. And so if you look at those two spaces and
where the intersection is, payments, credit, and collateral have really come across as three
opportunities for us to solve real problems in existing institutional workflows rather than
sort of speculative use cases or use cases that are trapped to only a crypto-native audience.
use cases or use cases that are trapped to only a crypto native audience.
And so if we look at each of them more specifically, payments, for example, cross-border rails,
as we know, are slow, expensive, inaccessible by many.
On the collateral side, there's major problems around trapped balance sheets and slow settlement
cycles, unnecessary counterparty risks, for example, you know,
without atomic exchange of assets.
And then on the credit side, we have fragmented manual financing infrastructure, inaccessible
funding venues or inaccessible investment opportunities on the lender side.
And so the goal is really to make these faster, atomic, and programmable on-chain by building features in these use cases on the XRP ledger.
To say it was really, like, overall really great
because it gave, like, exactly that insight
with examples and interesting use cases,
how XRP's utility plays into this
as well as the center of it.
For example, auto-bridging
and a bunch of other functionalities.
That was really great to see,
and I love to follow that roadmap along,
of course, with all of you guys.
From that part that Jazzy was talking about,
I'm interested, and Jazzy was already touching on it a bit here,
is from an architecture point of view,
from an XRPL ledger point of view,
why is the XRP ledger in a really great position
exactly for this right now?
And what are maybe some upcoming features
that we can talk about after
that would play into it?
Yeah, I think
Jazzy covered a lot of it.
I would add that
XRPL from day one
has been designed and purpose-built
for deterministic execution.
If you think about smart contract
platforms, it's sort of wild, wild west. You can deploy anything and everything. But when you think about deterministic execution. If you think about smart contract platforms,
you know, it's sort of wild west.
You can deploy anything and everything.
But when you think about deterministic execution,
it's predictability, it's consistency.
And I feel like XRPL has sort of cornered the market
on building the right primitives
that unlock financial use cases at scale.
And that's the first big reason that I think XRP is primed for this
time. And then the second thing is just frictionless and low cost asset movement. So these are cheap,
simple APIs for launching tokens and tokenizing assets. So those two things together, I think,
just kind of work really nicely. And then when I think about just the evolution of XRPL,
we're able to evolve the ledger without actually fragmenting it.
And we have all these native primitives at the protocol layer
that just directly fit into financial workflows.
And so this is really the time for XRPL to shine.
So Desi was mentioning tokenized collateral,
credit, and FX payments.
As a really main use case,
they are very promising
and there's a lot of product market fit out there.
What are some features that the XRP Ledger already has
or needs to do exactly these things?
For example, collateral or lending that you can mention?
Yeah, I think one of the simple things that you talked about earlier is that auto bridging
feature that's inside the DEX. When liquidity gets thin between two assets, the fact that the
ledger automatically routes through XRP to get the best possible price just kind of makes it seamless, you
know, and I think that's a nice feature that I think will become even more pronounced as,
you know, permission decks, permission domains are coming live, just kind of give more structure
to the market.
But yes, those kind of, you know, unique features that are part of the XRPL architecture that
I think are going to shine and bring additional utility to XRP.
There are so many new features.
There are also multipurpose tokens, token escrow, batch transactions, and all the stuff around permission as well.
Permission domains, permission decks.
Jazzy, maybe help us understand why do we need all these new features and will this really help XRP and the XRP Ledger to accrue more liquidity and volume on chain?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. There's definitely a lot in the roadmap, as you guys saw in the recent institutional DeFi roadmap piece.
start with permission domains and permission decks, two of the most recent features, you know,
taking a step back, the XRP ledger has supported open payments and the permissionless decentralized
exchange for a very long time, arguably, you know, longer than any other blockchain. There were
order books at first, and then more recently, we proposed and added an automated market maker,
but all of that was still permissionless.
With a payment, you know, when you look at institutional use cases, that usually works fine because you can send directly to a known counterparty. But with the decentralized exchange
or most exchanges in general, your counterparty is unknown. So it's really about open price
discovery and matching. And while this is great from a permissionless perspective, this is a problem for regulated institutions because they can't trade with an unknown counterparty and still meet their compliance restrictions. decks on top of that, what we're doing is allowing for institutions and regulated entities
to access these benefits of cross-currency payments and trading on the XRP ledger without
violating compliance expectations. And what's unique on top of this is the approach we used
on the XRP ledger does this in a way that it doesn't create liquidity silos.
We've seen fully permissioned protocols launched in other ecosystems before, and unfortunately, they largely failed.
And I think the problem here was they were fully separate and siloed from the other permissionless DEX or lending protocols.
permissionless DEX or lending protocols. But by building it with the permission domains mechanism,
it's very simple to arbitrage between the permissionless DEX and the permission DEX
to allow liquidity to flow freely between the two systems. So you really get the best of both worlds.
And the net effect there is institutions can use XRPL for production payments in FX and not just
experimentation. So, I mean, that's one example on the payments in FX and not just experimentation. So I mean that's one example on
the payments in FX side we can you know certainly get into similar examples later in the conversation
on the credit as well as collateral side. By the way for those who don't know,
Jenny's a huge fan of the native functionalities of the XRP ledger and how it differentiates itself
from other solutions as you can, and how she was saying,
which I love how you put that out.
One thing that comes to my mind,
specifically when you mentioned the permissioned DEX
and also that it's aggregating liquidity
and not segregating liquidity,
we definitely see a lot of protocols
who do different version updates,
version 2, 3, 4,
and each of it is its own protocol
with its own liquidity
that they cannot just take with them.
So that segregation is not on the XRP ledger
because it's all native aggregated.
That's a huge plus specifically for institutions.
So in these things, specifically the compliance buildings block building blocks that we just touched on uh the
the order book uh the xrp ledger decks um i'm i'm curious if you can maybe expand a little bit jazzy
on how like features like mpts token escrows and so on, fit specifically in the process of utility for, I guess, XRP
as a token and for institutions in that aspect?
Yeah.
So MPTs is a new, multipurpose tokens is a new token standard on the XRP ledger.
It's lighter weight than IOUs.
It has other advantages that make it very well suited for tokenizing real world assets, for example.
And on top of that, which I'm sure I will go into in more detail, and then privacy, you start to get the ingredients
for institutional grade delivery versus payment, which is basically the ability to exchange
assets and cash atomically in the same transaction, which reduces counterparty risk.
So this is a really clear value creation opportunity for blockchain technology solving a real world financial problem.
In terms of XRP fitting in, I think on the base level, XRP is always used for transaction fees and also account reserves and in some cases object reserves as well.
But I think there's more unique things we can build on top of that. I think
it makes a lot of sense to use XRP as the cash leg of a repo transaction, for example, in some cases,
because, you know, stable coins are often subject to different regulations and different
geographies. And XRP we know is regulated, we know is global, and can just make it a lot simple and more global
by replacing it on the cash flow as well within the transaction.
XRP is the only asset on the XRP ledger without a counterparty
and that any account can hold,
and that makes it very differentiated, obviously. Yes.
Krippen?
Another differentiator is also not only that XRP has no counterparty,
but also that in contrast to other networks, most of all,
in this case right now, all features are primitives.
They are native features.
But Mayuka, what I would really like to know,
because you are on the programmability side of programming,
why do we want primitives, or why do we still
want primitives to be the main
focus right now what makes it so different to have it all made to vent as a primitive on chain
yeah so i think primitives are a really good selling point for the the xrp ledger because
it means that everything just is sort of built in it works works natively. It's going to be battle tested, audited, all of that.
And it's just a transaction. You don't need to specify anything separate. You don't need to write your own code.
It'll just work. And with respect to the DEX specifically, it means that we don't have any liquidity segregation, as Jazzy was talking about earlier.
It's all just one big native DEX. It's not several different DEX smart contracts
or anything like that.
And that especially becomes a benefit
when you integrate something like the permission DEX into that.
Having that as a native feature
means that you can have that easy arbitrage.
You can have it all be just super seamless.
You don't need to integrate with some other system,
with some other smart contract.
It's all just, the XRP ledger is all just one big smart
contract, if you will.
It's a very seamless process.
It's all just very automatically integrated.
All you have to do is specify one extra fields
as a part of your permission decks.
So it's the exact same process, basically no change
as long as you're properly permissioned.
And I think that's just makes it so much easier to use.
Did you also mention, oh, go ahead.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, I was just saying, you mentioned, did you also mention, because this is something
that you always also highlight, the human readable transaction outputs that you can
generate?
Yeah, absolutely.
Human readable, human
generatable. You can just look at the transaction, see what the fields are and roughly understand
what that transaction is going to do just by looking at it. And you don't necessarily need
a whole bunch of tooling to just understand what your transaction is going to do, let alone understand how it integrates with the whole system.
You have your escrow object is named escrow.
Your offer, when you're trading,
your offer object is named offer.
It's all just super simple, super human readable,
super easy to use.
Once you, if you just understand how these things work,
you know exactly how to work with them.
Going with this, one of the other points that Jai was pointing out
in the beginning about interesting use cases,
and it certainly is like one that a lot of people in the XRP community right now are looking forward to.
I mean, Brad was mentioning it in the opening space.
Definitely when you look at Evernorth with Ashish,
how they have mentioned it multiple times
is of course the lending protocol.
This is right now currently up for voting
on the XRP ledger.
And a lot of people are looking into it.
Some people playing already around with it on the devnet.
So maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that, Jazzy,
why it is such a significant addition to the XRPL
and how it ties into this whole DeFi ecosystem
to have essentially native credit on chain.
Yeah, definitely.
This is definitely an exciting one for me and the team as well.
Credit is a brand new financial and technical primitive we're looking to bring to the ledger
in 2026, as you mentioned.
If we take a look at what's wrong today, what's missing today. What we've proposed here, I think,
is fundamentally different than what exists on other blockchains today, which is typically
more of a money market or margin instrument where you over collateralize one asset,
typically crypto, and then borrow cash, which is really great for crypto users, but doesn't solve the much broader real world financial problem and, you know, around financing and balance sheet expansion.
So what XLS 65 and 66, the lending protocol and single asset vault will introduce is credit functionality, including capital aggregation or fundraising,
including capital aggregation or fundraising, on-chain loan origination and servicing,
default management, and then, of course, yield accrual or ROI on the investor side.
And so this approach brings a number of different advantages both to
off-chain as well as on-chain lending today. So native lending makes originating,
collateralizing, and settlement fully programmable on-chain.
This version of lending will leverage a third-party custodian in the event that it's a
collateralized loan. And then we're looking at future versions that bake that right into the
protocol. So more to come on that front. And it really just removes a lot of the issues around
settlement delays, reconciliation problems, and just allowing new financing use cases, such as payments financing or working capital to be directly on chain for the first time.
So we're really excited about this.
You know, we're already seeing both grassroots projects from the XRPL, like Soil, adopting, experimenting, talking about this, which is great. We're also seeing,
you know, large institutions looking to the lending protocol to, you know, for balance sheet
expansion, essentially, and to cap, to tap new capital sources. So really good signals from the
market so far. And I think XRP can play, you know, right into this in terms of both gas and account reserves, liquidity for funding.
There's obviously a lot of XRP that's sitting unused today and being able to lend that out,
earn yield on your XRP and also provide a new funding source to borrowers is really a win-win
for the ecosystem. So we're really looking forward to this one. Krippen, I remember you were mentioning about with the lending protocol,
how we talked about this with the capital requirements that are different
and the advantages.
Yeah, the institutional approach is, I think, what makes this very different to other, let's say, more
decentralized or approaches that are off-chain, either off-chain completely, or that are completely
on-chain, like Aave, for example. So this hybrid, so this kind of middle ground, which
will use the best of XRP and XRPLpl but also give institutions like the like a chance to use
what they already know and love which brings me um to the question um jesse i mean many people will
many listeners right now will probably also like to know will ripple themselves also use
the lending protocol or is this just something for the broader institutional market or retailers
like us? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I will defer to the, you know, my counterparts
on the Ripple payments team to confirm or deny their plans there. I do think that, you know,
the lending protocol from a technology perspective makes a lot of sense for the payments financing use case.
I do think that that product set has seen a demand for credit in the past and the ability to do that in a decentralized way by tapping the economic value that's sitting in millions of accounts around the world of XRP holders really lines up from a supply and demand perspective.
So I think that's all I'll say on that front.
Yeah, let me definitely also say that I'm really happy that Mayuka did the Q&A here where people were able to ask questions for the Ripple payments
team about the extra P-LegendX integration that was really good so I
hope to see more of that definitely also in the future I mean okay
there are yeah go ahead When we talk about institutional products
and institutional demand, like I always think there's
this like this one puzzle piece that is missing.
We already know about compliance
and everyone is talking about compliance,
like permission domains, permission texts.
We already know this.
We know we need liquidity
and it needs to be regulated and compliant.
But IO, there's also privacy,
which is like a really difficult topic
because privacy is something we all want,
but at the same time,
it's pretty complicated on a technical level
because we are talking about zero knowledge proofs.
So maybe before we go deeper to privacy,
help us understand what a zero knowledge proof,
try to like any five zero knowledge proofs for us
yeah I'll try to keep this
straightforward
from a technology perspective
I think zero knowledge proofs have been around for a really
really long time
and they just didn't find
adoption until blockchains
come along in a massive way
right and the fundamental tool that zero knowledge
proofs represents is the ability to prove a statement is true while holding back the sensitive
and private information that would validate that proof. And there's a lot of applications
for zero knowledge proofs. Privacy and how we think about, you know, hiding information or confidentiality is one way to think about it,
but it's also useful for, you know, compressing information
so you can verify a large amount of data with very small,
with a small proof, right?
So for, you know, reducing storage costs, as an example.
reducing storage costs, as an example.
But in the institutional, you know,
but before I keep going,
does that help with at least a good sort of high-level way of understanding the tool?
Okay.
Definitely.
Cool.
So the second phase of this is that how do we actually instantiate this on a blockchain, right?
And in our particular case, again, we care about scale, we care about security, we care about privacy as use cases for C&L proofs.
But when I hone in on just privacy, the context is this, right?
What people do today when they want to hide information is that they store it in a database, they wrap it on APIs, they might encrypt that data, they may not.
But there's usually access controls that are part of determining
who gets access to that piece of data.
And that works for a large percentage of the audience, right?
A large part of the world.
But when you have to maintain the security of it,
depending on the use case, that actually breaks down because that data becomes a honeypot.
And if it's maintained by a single party, then that party becomes the central point of failure.
And so when you think about the reason that you would actually want to achieve privacy on a public chain. It's really because you want to leverage shared infrastructure.
You want to reduce your attack surface by, you know,
by shifting the complexity out of from one, you know, database to many databases.
Right. And the net effect is that, you know,
we have public shared infrastructure that are blockchains,
but we want, we desire private interactions.
And institutions have been expressing that through saying that,
hey, we want to protect our customers
and that they want to do things with digital assets.
They want to trade against it.
They want to move it for different reasons.
But we want those interactions to be private.
We don't want the whole world to know exactly
how our customers are deciding to use
and leverage this new technology.
And so that's where the motivation comes from
to kind of bring this technology on a public ledger,
but preserve the confidentiality
and hiding the sensitive information
between the parties that are involved in that interaction.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, so privacy essentially enables then security, right?
Correct. Yes.
And an analogy I can give to kind of help people
that are coming from a, you know,
from a Web2 kind of perspective is like,
when you log into your bank, right,
it's an HTTPS connection.
It's a secure connection that's private and it's over a public internet, right?
The network itself is open, but the connection between you and the bank is encrypted and private, right?
That's the same mental model that we're applying here for public blockchains,
in that it's public shared infrastructure, but it's private interactions.
And that's where zero knowledge proofs really come in.
So with zero knowledge proof and privacy
basically coming on a public blockchain
or can be incorporated on a public blockchain,
you have privacy and scalability, which you can then do.
Like very specific on the XRP Ledger,
what are some interesting use cases that it would
enable using like privacy?
Because I remember like maybe you want to touch on this, you mentioned maybe payment
channels could be something done with it.
Yeah.
Interoperability, maybe you know, you can dive more into this.
I think it would be great.
Yeah, so there are definitely a lot of interesting use cases. In the payment channel example, it's more about allowing you to pay a service, an online
service privately without them being able to identify you as a customer.
So if you think about VPNs, being able to surf the web at an internet cafe, but the
service provider or the VPN server is not able to track your network connectivity.
So that's like a low-hanging fruit that people that are looking for privacy would obviously leverage
the intersection of payment channel and the zero-dollar proofs to kind of get the streaming payments type of,
private streaming payments type of, you know, private streaming payments type of, you know, use case.
But for like interoperability, I think the value is really just the ability to connect
chains in a trustless way using a different set of techniques is the other value prop,
right?
And we talked about Intelledger protocol as one place this could be a real value add.
And then there's like... On this IO, yeah, if I'm asked, you mentioned like with ILP, how would that connection like
work or where would it touch it?
So if you think about how Inner Ledger works, I know you're one of the experts on how the protocol works.
But it's really a simplistic protocol that allows people to send value with a risk calculation.
Like, I'm only going to send as much as I'm willing to trust you.
So I send a penny, I'm willing to lose that penny.
But the idea is that you form a network of those that that are willing to send money in different to different connections at you know at a low cost right to them because if they if they
if it so it's a probabilistic type of protocol in that sense. And so the more connections you have
obviously the the faster to move value right. But being able to do this with different, you know, currencies, right, different chains was where the cost of integration kind of becomes high and leveraging payment channels like, you know, payment channels are becoming standardized, you know, about 10 years, about five to seven years ago across, you know, the big the big chains, you know, obviously Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRPL both have this as a building block.
But the idea was just to kind of leverage this as a building block
to make it easy to form large distributed networks of nodes
that are willing to send small amounts of money.
But offering privacy in this context makes it such that
you could send money anonymously through this network
and not have to trust. Basically, you're able to reduce the amount of trust you have in the network
because you're able to move value in this anonymous way across different chains.
Obviously, I had some regulatory issues because being able to KYC and sort of, you know, meet the regulatory requirements for these networks has been a challenge in practice.
And so adding privacy there is definitely a bigger lift because of the regulatory side of things.
Where is Ripple looking to add privacy, maybe initially with some amendments?
Great question. I think if you look at how, you know,
our token standard with multipurpose tokens
or MPTs has been evolving,
we're seeing more adoption.
And so if you think about stablecoins
being reissued as an MPT,
there's an opportunity to add, you know,
confidentiality as an extension to this token standard
that gives us optionality between, you know, if you want an extension to this token standard that gives us optionality between,
you know, if you want to explore this for stablecoin payments to add, you know, privacy versus,
you know, if you want to deal with tokenized assets, right? And in terms of, you know,
we've talked about repos as a concrete example where people are, you know, using collateral
as a concrete example where people are using collateral
and barring against it to trade
and being able to do that quickly, right?
So in both use cases, it's still the same components,
which is like being able to encrypt
the transaction amounts.
We could do the same thing with identities,
but we're starting with encrypting the amounts.
So that's not visible in public.
But then adding zero knowledge proofs for the proving of the correctness of that encrypted
transaction so that validators are confident that there's no double spend, there's no negative
balance or negative amounts that are being spent. But the same validation logic that validators execute
when the transactions are clear,
they're now, we're leveraging
to an office to execute those same functions
while the transaction is encrypted.
So that's really the balance
that we're introducing on chain.
And obviously we can get into the details another time
of the type of zero knowledge proof that we're executing.
But conceptually, it's just really bringing encryption
and zero knowledge proofs together in a meaningful way
that makes it easier to add privacy on a public chain
for MPTs.
That's awesome.
Yeah, sounds pretty fascinating.
And also complicated, but also very necessary,
especially also in combination with compliance.
What I would like to know from all of you guys right now is if you could just in a few words
describe what you are personally focused on right now.
I think, Mayuka, for you, very obviously programmability, maybe?
I guess so, right?
MAYUKA KUZEKERAVANI- Yeah, absolutely.
Anybody who's been following me knows I've been working hard
on what we're calling smart escrows.
So essentially, our vision for programmability
is keeping what makes the XRPL special.
So that would be a lot of the primitives
that I was talking about earlier.
We don't wanna replace them.
We want to augment them, make them better.
So what we're really looking at programmability at
is the glue that'll connect these native building blocks,
these primitives with a little bit of flexibility
for custom on-chain business logic.
And so smart escrows is the first
of what we're calling smart features that'll do this, which basically takes the existing escrow primitive and makes it just
a little smarter, a little more customizable so that people have a little more flexibility with
how they can use it. And right now we're deep in the review and testing phase and hoping to release that soon for amendment voting
and for people to use.
So very excited about that and looking forward to that.
Maybe you and Jesse as well.
Just a few words.
We have just a couple more seconds.
Sure.
Yeah, I can go.
I'm going to cheat and say two, but I'll be concise. Credit on the tech side,
I think, is very exciting. It's an entirely new technical primitive. We're seeing interesting
projects pop up, as I mentioned before, both grassroots and institutional. So I think this
is just a really exciting new technical infrastructure on XRPL. From a market perspective, I think on-chain collateral mobility and repos are clearly the sweet spot.
It's just such a big problem in traditional finance today with a very clear and obvious solution on-chain without even much change to the tech stack.
On the TradFi side, collateral is just so siloed and slow to move.
the TradFi side, collateral is just so siloed and slow to move. We have cash in one account,
treasury is locked up in its own verticalized system, equities isolated in another, and moving
this to settle, to re-hypothicate is just a huge pain, and it's very, very slow and inefficient.
So bringing this on-chain, faster settlement directly unlocks capital efficiencies and is a clear
advantage that can be solved with basically a simple batch transaction. So really excited about
that from a market perspective. I'm going to go a different angle and talk about,
I've been paying attention to a lot of what's happening on the agentic side,
particularly with autonomous agents.
I think this is the year we see more programmable collateral tied to autonomous agents,
where you can build an AI treasury manager on blockchain rails.
And I think XRPL will probably be the cheapest to build these type of agentic solutions,
be the cheapest to build these type of agentic solutions.
And not just for payments, but also for tokenizing collateral
and sort of the intersection with AI-based treasury management.
Amazing.
That was a fantastic conversation with all of you,
Crippen, Mayuka, Jazzy, and Ayo.
Make sure to always look in the comment section, by the way,
for the occasional swag drops.
They happen every now and then, and first come, first serve.
And with that, I want to lead to the next session,
which is here with Stu and Chrissy.
Make sure to stick around.
It's going to be an awesome conversation.
And, yeah, happy community, everybody.
Thanks a lot, Vett and Krippen.
Thanks, Rafael.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Hi, everybody. This is Stu Alderote. Can you hear me?
Can you hear me? I just wanted to be sure.
Yeah, Chrissy, I can hear you.
Great.
Perfect.
All right.
So thanks, everybody, for joining.
I'm Stu Alderode.
I think many of you know me as Ripple's chief legal officer, but I'm here today wearing my other hat as president of the National Cryptocurrency
Association, the NCA. As some of you may know, the NCA is a non-profit. It was created to make
crypto accessible for everyone. We saw too much information and confusion out there when it came
to crypto, and we wanted to change that. And mission at the NCAA is simple we want to help everyday Americans
understand and use crypto with confidence we've been conducting research
to get to the true picture of crypto in America and what we found is that crypto
doesn't have a type its holders it spans ages, it spans regions, income levels, and more. Nearly a third of
crypto holders in the U.S. are women. More work in construction than work in finance.
More people over 55 own and use crypto than under 25. And they're using it more than just
investing. They're using it for shopping and donating, for art, for real estate,
and even cattle ranching. But here's the challenge. The number one barrier for those not yet using
crypto in the United States, and I think there are over 80 million crypto curious in the U.S.,
there's a knowledge gap. They just don't get it they feel overwhelmed and
they're trying to learn about it which is why they need resources that they can
understand and trust and the NCA is building those resources we build free
tools like 101 courses basic introduction to crypto that you can find on our website. We have a hands-on
risk-free simulator to try if you want to figure out how do I open a wallet? How do I make a
deposit? How do I actually purchase crypto? You can do it in a simulated environment on the NCA
website. And we also have the Crypto Explained podcast, a weekly jargon-free, tech-free podcast
that you can find on all of the podcast platforms. And we've also been traveling across the country,
meeting with crypto holders and hearing their stories. And today, I'm excited to be joined
by one of them, Chrissy Burrell.
She is a consultant, she's a caregiver, and she is a longtime XRP holder.
If you visit the NCA website, you can see her full story on the website.
She's got years of experience using crypto in her daily life. And we invited Chrissy to come to XRP Community Day to tell us all about it.
So welcome, Chrissy.
Hello, welcome, welcome, welcome to the amazing day that this is.
Thank you so much for having me, Stu.
I am just feeling great and honored to be here.
I feel like XRP Community is just, you all are just my sisters and brothers from another mother.
I am so grateful for my journey and just so grateful to be able to speak with you today.
That is fantastic. Let's start at the beginning, Chrissy. Just tell us, how did your crypto journey start?
Wow. I chuckle a lot thinking about this because there are other people that were telling me I'm from the stone ages of crypto.
But I'm pretty happy about that today just because of the journey that has really helped me to build the strength to stand where we are today.
But my journey did. It started really, really early back in 2009.
And at that time, you know, I was just newly married, had a new baby, you know, in a job that I had been at for several years.
And pretty much that job was phasing out.
And so a friend of mine, he and I, we had been talking about investments.
He had, we both, you know, we had our 401ks and our traditional setups, but, you know, he had a new
baby as well. And we both were talking about, we wanted something more. And so just over the time,
he and I just started to talk and we're like, okay, you know, because we kind of felt the stack,
the deck was stacked against us, you know, recession and everything. And we were trying to educate ourselves. And he
was going to educate himself with stocks. And I was going to educate myself with Forex. And then
we would share the information and just, okay, yeah, we'll make a plan for our families. However,
in the middle of all this, just one beautiful, fateful day, I am so grateful for today.
He came to my desk and he's like, you know, hey, he's on this forum and there was this coin that was on this forum and we could purchase this coin. And he said, hey, you know, they're saying that this is the new money
and it's already increasing in price and people are exchanging goods and services with it.
And so he was that guy that, you know, I just, we were good friends, pretty much everyone in our
work community were close knit. And so he was that guy though. He was forward thinking, you know,
close-knit. And so he was that guy, though. He was forward-thinking. He was always on the
cutting edge of tech and tech news. He was very well-researched. So anything he said, we're like,
okay, yes. Whatever he says, let's go with it. And honestly, it seemed like a thing to do. So
of course, your workday is going going on and I wanted to go back and
ask him that particular day, like, you know, how do I get started? And so I was standing by his desk
and I was waiting in line because he was talking to someone else. And in that moment, just because
of everything that was going on, I mean, you know, people were, you know, in my own department talking about what
they were going to do, you know, if we lost our jobs, because we were under the threat of losing
our job. My husband had already lost his job during that time. Also, people were trying to
choose between gas and lunch money, you know, So it was a very difficult time. And so
I thought to myself in that moment, you know, what if I give up, you know, this, I want to buy a
hundred, you know, but what if I give this money up and I don't have enough and they give me a
layoff because we had been getting many notices. And so I just talked myself out of it. But that particular seed that he planted
to let me know that there was this new emerging tip on the horizon and that people were actually
using it and it was being viably, you know, people were changing, exchanging goods. I'm like, okay,
hey, you know, this is something I should do.
And that was a seed.
Even though I did not buy in at that time, which, of course, I've had my own moments of regret.
But that was a seed.
I assume that was Bitcoin, i assume that was bitcoin right it was yeah yeah yeah so you
didn't uh so you had an opportunity to buy into bitcoin in two two 2009 you didn't so okay we
don't have a time machine we can't go back right right yeah uh but eventually you did become a
crypto holder so tell us about that yeah so you So, you know, just over the years, I continued to seek and research and just learn, you know, for a key transition.
So I don't you know, I didn't have access to him in in, you know, getting the information that I was wanting from that.
But, you know, we stayed in touch for a little while afterwards.
But, you know, of stayed in touch for a little while afterwards. But, you know, of course,
life was happening. But at the time, you know, there were just so many other
things that I could invest in, but crypto just never left my mind. I mean, it was just something
about it. And I just felt like, you know, if I could get the information, that is really what I was looking for.
If I could just get the information to figure out, you know, what this was.
I mean, at that time when he said that they were exchanging goods and services, of course, in my mind at that moment, that's the use case.
That's the purpose. You know, we can just, you know, buy things with this or I can barter is what I was really thinking.
But just over the years, you know, my interest continued to peak and I discovered like these different forums and portals and websites that had information on it.
websites that had information on it. There were some other investments that I was interested in,
but, you know, they had these barriers to entry. You had to have a certain amount of money to
invest. You had to have a certain amount of net worth. And during that time, you know,
I just didn't have that. And so I really loved the fact that crypto showed promise.
There was no huge minimum investment.
Everyone pretty much could participate.
You could just learn how to buy it.
And then you're an owner.
And I'm like, this is my cup of tea, you know.
So I just love that part about it.
And when, so what was your, when did you actually first purchase crypto?
It was around like between the years of like 2015 to, because there was a, there was a forum that I ended up landing upon.
landing upon. And on this particular forum, people were just offering coins and then there were
trading possibilities. And so once I got onto that particular forum, I was able to go back and forth
like changing coins. And at that time, you know, there wasn't a lot of information. We didn't have
a lot of vocabulary. And I really liked the platform. And I kind of felt like it was my
theme for a while. But the actual emerging of Coinbase really just changed my life because they were the ones who introduced the coins
that I was interested in and that I still have information on to this day.
And that is what?
XRP.
And it's the reason that we're here today.
And Coinbase had these modules and the modules were informational,
they were educational, they had a little entertainment to it, they had rewards. And so
once I stumbled upon XRP and other coins, I felt like I had more than just what that other form was offering me. I felt like I had something
that had value to it in a different and unique way because information was backing it.
And even though like the other form was fun, when you're looking at something with possibilities for the future, you know, you want something that is a little bit more solid.
Once I landed upon the and I remember, like I just literally remember the module about XRP.
I mean, it was a standout point to me. And I'm like, hey, I get this. Now, I'm thinking too, maybe just thinking back,
it could be because my mom was in banking my entire life. And that could be where I just
got it. It just clicked for me. But XRP set a standard for me. It whet my appetite for more
out of crypto. I fell in love with the tech. I fell in
love with the infrastructure plans. I fell in love with just the possibilities. And it was explained
in layman's terms on Coinbase. And so, you know, you just have those things in life that just land.
in life that just land. And XRP was that. It just landed for me. And from there, I just began to
research and began to look at white papers and began to look more into, but it definitely
piqued my interest beyond that portal. And that's why I say education is so important.
is so important.
Yeah, and obviously, as I said earlier,
the NCA, we're very focused on education.
And the NCA is protocol neutral.
We're token neutral.
But we like to tell the stories.
And your story happens to be an XRP story, which
fits really nice for XRP Community Day.
And I think you touched upon this a little bit in terms of, so, you know, 2009, 2015,
that's a lot of years to pass where you're educating yourself, you're thinking about it,
you're being thoughtful, you're not being reckless.
Right.
But there's something about the XRP protocol that kind of jumped off the page and captured you.
Maybe just talk a little bit more about that.
What was it about XRP and how was it different from some of the other tokens and coins that you were looking at or considering?
Yes.
So XRP, it had a level of transparency to it that I just I mean, it was just so tasty.
You know, I'm like, hey, this is well explained.
It seemed professional, you know, coming from corporate America.
You know, you want things that kind of like cross the seas and dots the eyes.
And so I just kind of felt like XRP was that for me.
And I remember even just staring, you know, staring at
this, like there's something to this. And I love the tech and I felt like it was a merger, like a
merger between traditional assets and digital assets. And so it just kind of felt like the tech
was foundational and it wasn't just that it was a coin or we were just trying
to make money with something. I felt it was solution oriented. And there was power in that
because as a person, just as my personality, I'm very solution oriented. I love emerging tech. I love being able to make things easier. And so I could just see
the long-term scope, the potential of it, the possibilities of it. And I feel like the education
and looking into it and looking at the people behind it and the structure, the blueprint, it just really made sense. And so that's important.
You know, it's important because when you don't have the vocabulary and someone gives you the
vocabulary, I mean, you feel empowered. You're like, hey, you know, I've got something here.
And that's really how I felt. I felt it was also inclusive. I felt it was global and there were just,
you know, viable partnerships and,
you know, the framework was solid.
It just, it just made sense.
The, as I think about XRP, right?
XRP has sort of an institutional use case enterprises.
It's used for financial institutions banks
payment providers large large enterprise prices for treasury management for
cash flow all of those things but there's also a large retail base like
you everyday Americans and others all over the world that that own and use XRP. Tell me a little bit, Chrissy, give me an anecdote or two about how XRP has
your personal life. Oh my God, XRP has been so valuable in my personal life. My third child was born with a diagnosed disability. And so,
of course, I had been building my career pretty tenaciously over the years. And so,
you know, once I had her, she had that disability. And, you know, it was just a true financial hit to my family. As well as, you know, I had to cut back on my business,
I had to cut, cut down different jobs that I was doing contract wise. And crypto has been a
lifeline. I mean, that particular crypto as well, has also given me just, I would say like a, it's been like a little piggy bank for me. So,
um, it's something that I definitely kept on the side and I have my short-term and long-term plans.
And basically, you know, there was just, just, just to be frank with you, I would say,
um, there was a day that I needed some funds to go get groceries. And because
XRP was fast, you know, because I had been using Bitcoin and I love Bitcoin, but you know, and I
love all the cryptos, but XRP was just, it was just quick to me. And I had a portal that I could log
into and execute a trade. And I was sitting in front of
the grocery store. I remember checking my bank account and I'm like, oh my gosh, okay, these
things have come through. Hubs is at work. I need access to some funds quickly. So he had the credit
card and I'm like, okay, I've got to get access to something.
So I was able to execute a trade just sitting there in the parking lot.
I was able to utilize my crypto to yield funds right to my debit card. So I went in about groceries and it said my family, my daughter, my youngest
with her diagnosed disability, she has not qualified for insurance. So we've had to have a
really decent, I would say, well spread out portfolio that we're managing for her.
So that she'll have something and crypto XRP ETF,
other assets, crypto assets are a part of that,
traditional and digital stocks, you know, all of that.
So we have been thankfully blessed,
but I promise you, I have been so grateful for XRP.
It is deeply dear to my heart, and that's why I just feel so honored to speak today
to the XRP community. Well, I love it. We hear a lot of crypto serving the underbanked or crypto, especially XRP, being fast, being liquid, it's being transparent, instantaneous.
And, you know, these things, you hear them, they are, you hear them, they're talking points.
But when you hear these stories, you're like, it's actually happening in real life.
And you don't need to be a large enterprise.
You don't need to be engaging in a big cross-border transaction between one bank to another payment provider.
Here we have an XRP holder, a caretaker, a mom sitting in a parking lot trying to access funds to buy groceries,
and XRP becomes an instantaneous tool to make that happen. It's just such an incredibly powerful
story. So thank you for sharing that. So a lot of the folks who are listening here on XRP
Community Day, I assume these are not the
crypto curious, these are not the crypto cautious, although there may be a few
amongst them. These are the folks who kind of understand the narrative and
they have not only bought into the vision but they are part of this new
technological movement and innovation known as crypto.
But to the extent we do have some listeners that are crypto curious or even crypto cautious,
what would you want those people to take away from both your experience and the discussion that we've been having today?
Oh, wow.
Oh, wow. So I would just love for I would say to the newcomers, you know, education is important.
It is critical. It gives you the grounding that you need for this crypto space.
Crypto has so many possibilities. You know, of course, nothing is guaranteed, but possibilities are
available. And it will help you just to, you know, when you're making educated decisions,
and you're, you know, making a decision based off of critical thinking, if you allow yourself to be
open and think critically, you know, you can make that
decision that's going to rarely be something you regret. So a lot of times, you know, we have
talking heads and there's just a lot of noise and everything, but education helps you to kind of
raise your mind above the noise and to decide what's best for you. And you have a community, crypto community.
I mean, crypto community is amazing.
They are some of the best people that you will find good hearts,
rallying for one another.
I mean, wanting to see each other win.
And so community is so important because, you know, the road can get bumpy just in anything.
I mean, crypto is not an outlier to volatility, as many people would like to make it seem.
It's not an outlier to scam, as tools that are needed to make the decisions that you
need to make for the vision that you have so that you can align with a community, you can align with
an asset, something that you believe in. So we want to make sure that, you know, we're reminding ourselves of our reasons, our why, why we're doing this, and just to take
courage, take heart. You're not in this alone. You're brave, just to even want to get involved.
And to the XRP community, I salute you. You are valiant. You are overcomers. You are phenomenal people who are just able to make it
this far with your stick to it. And I appreciate you just for being there for me during the times
when things were shaky. It was the XRP community that reminded me of why I even chose this in the first place.
So we've got to remind ourselves.
And we also have community to remind us.
And I'll close with this.
You know, in the Chronicles of Narnia, there's like this character.
And he, you know, he's going and he gets bewitched and kind of falls under this veil.
But it is his community that brings him back to himself, that reminds him of who he is.
So just remember, you know, who you are.
Have gratitude on deck.
You know, when things are going on in the world or in your personal world, when you have gratitude on deck, you will win somehow, some way every time.
So you have the power to overcome.
yourself for the future, prepare yourself even for exchanging, like I teach my children about
exchanging coins and, and, you know, things that they will possibly do in the future if we're not
using USD, just to understand when they get old enough, and they're able to use crypto, that,
you know, this is a viable asset for them. So I just want people to understand the importance of
education. So educate, educate, educate, raise your mind above the noise and know that you were
born for times like these and you shall get through to the other side well and good.
So just stay encouraged.
Well, thank you, Chrissy.
Thank you for sharing your story.
Thank you for sharing your inspiration and your shout out
and sharing your affinity to the XRP community.
Education, education for those,
if you're getting challenged,
for those listening by friends and family
about what is this crypto all about,
send them to nca.org.
And before we close,
I'm excited to announce the third swag drop.
Our Ripple X account just shared the link
in the comments section to enter to win one of those.
If they run out, there's still one more coming up
in the apac session and stick around to tune into the next session which is the america's
innovation spotlight thank you chrissy and thank you everybody
yeah thanks to chrissy and great to hear from national crypto currency association
and great to hear from national crypto currency association we will start in a minute um we have
some amazing guests here for the next session and uh definitely keep uh all your eyes on the ripple
x dev uh replies when they drop um the next swag let's see if we have
everybody here on board
Solomon
let's do a mic check I guess
how's it going can you hear me
yes sir
Ashish
I'm here
how's it going
fantastic
and Robinson
GM GM happy to be back
on another XRP ripple
space
that's you know when someone is a true web 3 native
you know when they say GM GM
I think we're waiting for Brad
from Gemini
can you hear me
yes I think you need to wait no longer for Brad from Gemini. Can you hear me?
Yes.
I think you need to wait no longer.
Oh, now I can hear you.
Yes, perfect.
Great.
Now we have everybody on board and mic check is also complete.
Well, Solomon.
Yeah, welcome everybody
to XRP Community Day
for those just tuning in.
Super excited for this
XRP innovation spotlight. I am Ryan Solomon in, super excited for this XRP innovation
spotlight. I am Ryan Solomon, founder and CEO of Genfinity. Today's community first session will
highlight how XRP utility is expanding across real financial infrastructure and live production
environments. Today, we're going to hear from leading organizations and projects that are
actively deploying and enabling XRP across institutional finance, exchanges, DeFi and multi-chain infrastructure.
Yeah, we will definitely start with a few introductions here.
I want to start with Ashish, who is representing Evernorth. And Evernorth is building one of the
largest regulated XRP treasury vehicles, go by the ticker XRPN, backed by institutional capital,
with strategic ties to Ripple, as publicly listed, as mentioned, Nasdaq. Their intention is to provide
regulated access to XRP exposure,
specifically XRP DeFi yield opportunities, grow the XRP ecosystem, and really dive into that.
Evernor Osborne also wants to accelerate XRP DeFi by bringing institutional DeFi to the XRPL ecosystem at scale,
something that we have been talking about in the previous session the one before with the folks from ripple x about all the upcoming features this is where
it all ties also together um and then we have uh gemini and uh maybe you want to take that some
yep gemini is a trusted i mean most people here i'm sure everybody knows gemini uh they are a
trusted crypto platform building out secure financial infrastructure for the next generation
of money and markets on a global scale they've been actively working with ripple on xrp and
rl usd integrations including recent announcements around payments, card programs, and settlement
infrastructure. I think that I have Wormhole as well. All right. Wormhole is the leading
interoperability platform connecting traditional finance and the internet economy. Having
facilitated over $70 billion in value transfer across more than 40 blockchains,
they've been working closely with Ripple to support interoperability for both XRP and RealUSD,
enabling these assets to move across chains and reach new liquidity and application environments.
So super excited today to hear exclusive insights into what is live with Wormhole, how XRP and RLUSD adoption are expanding through Wormhole,
and why this matters for real XRP utility.
Vet, I will kick off with Evernorth here, I guess, and Ashish, for those newer to Evernorth,
why is institutional treasury strategy around XRP such a big focus for you, and what excites
you most about this opportunity?
Well, I just want to start. Maybe I should have had a Chronicles of Narnia quote like
Chrissy did in the last session. But yeah, I missed that opportunity. I couldn't think
of one fast enough. But I'm Ashish Berla. I was with Ripple from 2013 for about a decade.
I launched Evernorth. And I'll tell you like why I'm excited
about this crossroads we're in with crypto and XRP.
For a lot of years, we've been building product in crypto.
And in the last year,
we've seen regulation come to fruition.
So, you know, with the Genius Act, with stablecoins,
and now hopefully soon here with the market structure bill as well.
But what's been lacking until very recently
is institutional capital coming on chain.
And I think that is really exciting for me.
And so that's part of the mission for Evernorth is now let's bring that institutional capital
and retail capital.
And let's now bring that on chain.
And let's now build out that institutional DeFi ecosystem on top of XRP while bringing
that capital on chain.
And that really excites me.
I've been waiting for this moment for almost a decade, and it's here.
And I think those three things, again, regulation, product, and institutional capital
need to happen together in unison to make this scale.
And I think we're at that right intersection today.
So that's why I'm excited.
And that's really a big part of why I launched Evernorth. I'm even more excited about that.
Maybe we have a race on this. But in a recent interview that I've seen, I think it was with
Tony. Big shout out to Tony, Thinking Crypto. You were talking really beautifully about the XRP Ledger DEX and DeFi and how it all ties together.
I want to know from you specifically, why is the XRP Ledger DEX or the XRP Ledger as a protocol so well suited for institutional capital and liquidity as compared maybe to other venues?
No one's ever said anything I said was beautiful.
So thank you.
And also a shout out to Tony, my boy, one of the biggest XRP community supporters out there.
Thank you, Tony.
You know, the DEX is magic, I'll tell you.
And that was one of the first things that drew me to the XRP ecosystem.
And, you know, if you got to think back to 2012, the creators of XRP had the vision to create a technology that was built for payments and built for financial use cases.
That means it's native.
That means it's fast, that means it's fast,
it's performant. And the history of products out there in the tech industry and non-tech industry
will show you that specialized products that have mass appeal tend to scale and tend to win out.
And having that XRP DEX built in is a huge advantage for the XRP ecosystem.
Because what are we learning, right?
Like the more tokenization you have, the more stable coins you have,
what do all those things need to make them performant and useful in the real world?
They need liquidity.
They need to be able to be interchanged.
And that's what the DEX built in
can potentially do for all these tokenized assets.
So I'm excited about it.
I think it's a key feature.
It's almost like magic that's built in
to the XRP technology.
And that's why I'm super excited about it.
A huge differentiator
and now building that liquidity around that DEX and all the different kinds of
tokenized assets in a compliant way is super exciting to me.
On this if I can expand a little bit also on that Ashish. What are some of the
things that fit exactly because it feels like really an awesome match
when you look at what institutions are looking for in the XRPL. Maybe from your point of view,
and you've been in the industry for so long and have been building these institutional products,
what are some of the things that institutions really, really want and that they care about
that makes the XRPL so fitting for them? Well, I'll tell you like one thing that institutions really want is they
they want 24 by 7 liquidity.
Now, if you try to do FX trades today,
you know, they have cutoff times.
Markets are open and closed.
Equities, for example, today, they're
you know, you got closing hours.
And if anything happens after hours, you've got to find all sorts of derivatives to trade that are open 24-7.
But today, we live in a global world.
And folks want access to these products, no matter what time zone they're're in because business is 24-7 these days as well.
And so 24 by 7 liquidity on a performant exchange is super important.
And again, on-chain DEXs, I think, really help to provide that 24 by 7 liquidity for all kinds of assets. It could be equities,
but it could also just be regular FX trades. FX is foreign exchange. What you need for
cross-border payments, for example, is you need FX exchange. So I'm excited about not only RLUSD,
US dollar stablecoins, but all sorts of other stable coins around the world. I was just in Korea.
There's some legislation around there for getting KRW, the local currency, also as a
stable coin.
I think that's exciting because, again, you can now start trading these different currencies
24 by 7 using, you know, debt space liquidity pools.
I'll shout out to Tony as well.
I know during his first interview with Brad,
he asked essentially,
are we going to have Web3 companies 20 years from now,
or is it just going to essentially be incorporated
into the system, which I thought was super smart.
And the last guest talking about education,
it's so critical.
And on that topic, Ashish,
you've touched base before on how native on-chain or on-ledger credit and lending can change how
institutions think about holding XRP through kind of the, I guess, the educational broad lens here.
For those who may not be familiar, can you briefly explain that concept and how it could fit into an
institutional treasury or a balance sheet strategy over time.
Yeah, well, like when I say on-chain, I mean tokenized on-chain
and there's an active market on-chain as well.
So a lot of people when they say,
okay, I'm gonna move something on-chain,
it's almost just like they're using a database.
They're moving it on-chain,
but you can't really do anything interesting with it.
When I'm talking about on-chain,
I mean that there is a liquidity pool around it,
meaning that you can trade it.
If you're talking about lending,
that means there's borrowers and lenders brought together to create an on-chain lending marketplace.
Why I think this is really interesting
is because I think that in the future, you're going to have wallets or anything from PayPal to Robinhood that are the front ends.
And then you're going to have the back ends.
And the back ends are going to be like if you think about deposits of a bank, you think of that as stable coins.
you think of that as stable coins.
But if you think about lending,
why not give those front ends,
those wallets,
the ability to tap into a back end
like a lending market?
So XLS 66,
I'm really excited about it.
We had a blog post about it
at Evernorth.
But the opportunity to participate
in a compliant institutional grade lending market is really interesting to us.
Why is it interesting to Evernor?
Well, one of the things that we want to do is build yield for our treasury, our XRP treasury.
And we can do it on chain even better.
even better. I mean, how great that we can actually get yield, but then also foster a
more vibrant XRP DeFi ecosystem that is institutional grade. I think that's a win-win
in lending markets. I mean, you talk about stable coins as number one, I would say like
the lending markets and bringing that on chain is also super interesting in terms of a crypto
native. But what you should be thinking about is
this is like unbundling of all these different financial services on chain. Again, stablecoins
being deposits, lending markets, private credit markets, repo markets, that's an unbundling
of a financial service but brought on chain. And then the front ends, wallets,
you know, and so forth, they can start picking and choosing these different, you know, on-chain
primitives and building new user experiences with them as well. I would say the second point that
I'm really excited about is that so much of this is manual today. If you look at a corporate
finance system, a lot of this is done manually. You're calling someone up to trade FX for your
treasury. You're calling people for quotes on different lending markets. How great would it be
if it were automated and turnkey? And you can do that when you bring these kinds of markets on chain.
They're programmatic. You know, the liquidity is going to be there. It's an all or nothing
sort of like it completes or it doesn't. And so those are also super great benefits as well.
So Ashish, you mentioned the blog post that you did by Evernorth,
which also was really great.
I liked the graphics on the lending protocol
and some of the plans that you were laying out there.
Specifically at the end, there was like a call to action
for people, developers, validators to come test,
help shape the amendment.
And going along with this,
what are some of, like,
as these features come closer to reality as well,
what are some immediate next steps
that you are most excited about
or you want to tackle with Ever North?
Yeah, so, you know,
our priority is, you know,
to continue to, you know,
raise capital and expand the treasury, of course.
But hey, I'm a product guy.
I was a product guy at Ripple.
I really want to see us build more of these yield kinds of products that we need for the treasury. But I want to see those built on chain.
I want to see them built on XRP.
And then, you know, natively, I think, is a big advantage, right?
Like, I don't have to worry about smart contract risk.
And that is what I talk about institutional grade.
So I think a lot of where the XRP team is headed
with some of these protocols on XRP directly, natively, is really interesting to me.
So, hey, I want to go out there and advocate for bringing new kinds of products,
like, you know, DeFi bolts that I'm sure someone will talk about in one of these sessions,
on-chain.
Let's make that even easier, right?
Let's make those products even easier.
I think that's one thing that's held the industry back, is that it's just too complicated for any normal user to use. But let's make it
easier for institutions to participate in that vibrant DeFi ecosystem that's being built on top
of XRP. So I'll be working directly with the teams for advocating for new protocols and helping
design ones that we want to see,
Evernorth wants to see, you know, directly on XRP as well.
That's amazing. And something that a lot of people wanted to see and which then happened,
coming to you, Brad, from Gemini, was the recently launched XRP credit card,
which was a really big moment for a lot of people.
They took pictures with it, showed it around on the socials.
Maybe can you walk us through how it works in practice
and what kind of demand you are seeing from users recently?
Sure.
Thanks again for having me here
and a pleasure to talk about how we're working together
with Ripple and the general community here.
So, yeah, I mean, Gemini was actually the very first issuer of a crypto rewards credit card.
And last year we launched an XRP specific edition of the Gemini credit card.
And it's probably pretty obvious, but the way that the product works is that when you make a purchase with the Gemini credit card, you receive XRP as your credit card reward instead of cash or points or, you know, sort of whatever rewards program you may be involved in with your, you know, credit card company. So it is a fantastic way for new and existing users to
get additional access to XRP. It is literally just swipe and earn. So on top of that, the credit
card itself has the XRP logo on it, which we have seen really resonates with the community here in terms of
giving them new ways to not just earn XRP, but express their loyalty and excitement around XRP.
We have seen in light, you know, a tremendous amount of folks on social media that are
incredibly keen and excited to, you XRP-themed credit card.
And so, I mean, the whole idea is that this is another way to allow people in the XRP community
to show affinity visibly towards XRP.
And it's been, I can easily say it's been our most popular card edition that we have launched.
That's awesome to hear.
And I think we're seeing more and more use cases that really just kind of meet the everyday users where they're at.
I know you guys have worked with MasterCard and WebBank to explore stablecoin settlement with RLUSD to improve fiat payments. At a high level,
just curious, can you maybe walk us through what problem that solves and where you see the
opportunity there? Sure. And I think this piggybacks pretty consistently with some of
the things that Ashish was talking about just earlier in terms of what the adoption rate and the institutional community looks for in sort of crypto space,
as well as what specifically, you know, the XRP Ledger necessarily facilitates.
But simply put, we have we're working with Web Bank and MasterCard with the goal of ultimately using RLUSD on XRP Ledger to settle the Gemini credit card transactions,
which would make this one of the very first collaborations where a regulated U.S. bank settles traditional card transactions using a regulated stable coin on a public blockchain.
So to put a little bit more simply, it is specifically designed to facilitate blockchain-based settlement processes between MasterCard and Webink. And why does this make
a ton of sense? Obviously, with low costs and all the fast processing combined with a decade of
reliable performance, XRP Ledger offers a trusted foundation for digital payments.
You know, XRP Ledger offers a trusted foundation for digital payments.
That goes back to, you know, sort of what the use case and what the model was when it was originally designed.
And furthermore, with XRP being the digital currency that powers the ledger, it gets to play a key role, which obviously helps, you know, keep the network secure and enable all these transactions.
network secure and enable all these transactions. And we think that this is sort of the one of the
very first and out loud use cases that has, you know, really massive implications for the way
that we and ultimately the industry approach, you know, card and ultimately payment settlement
in the near and long term. So going with this, Brad, can you explain that there's an overarching relationship
with Ripple Prime? And maybe you can discuss the opportunities there between Gemini and Ripple
Prime specifically towards the markets that you operate in? Sure. obviously Gemini operates a handful of markets, a spot crypto market, perpetual market and a recently launched predictions market.
And so we've been working with the Ripple Prime team on on two fronts.
One of those is we've been engaged with the Ripple Prime team to integrate into the Gemini markets on the native crypto side, which is both the spot and perpetuals.
That allows them to offer access to our liquidity for all of their prime clients for whom they ultimately do all sorts of execution, connectivity and financing for.
And more recently, we've been engaged in discussions about our recent launch of Gemini prediction markets,
which we just launched in December.
And, you know, the overlay between the crypto native folks on the Ripple Prime side, showing a keen interest in accessing,
obviously, this quickly growing market is really sort of dovetails in the fact that
we have here at Gemini, a number of crypto native users. And so we've seen a tremendous
amount of success, not just in the sports and political predictions, but really on the short, near long term duration crypto contracts.
And so there is, you know, I think there's probably a high degree of overlap in terms of the folks that are interested in XRP, interested in crypto, and interested
in prediction markets.
And we have been having a lot of early stage discussions as the Ripple Prime team continues
to determine what the right path or paths for them as they engage in this marketplace
for their clients.
I think, Brad, we have a couple of minutes here with you still. So I kind of want to ask the low-hanging fruit. What are you excited about? Forward-looking statements type question here within, you know, relationships with Ripple or, you know, XRP Community Day or even the broader space. And certainly thank you so much for joining today.
Yeah, again, thanks for having me. One thing I didn't really touch on, but worth explaining or exploring is the fact that we've also been integrated RLUSD as one of the stable coins on our spot books as well. And so we ultimately do kind of a unified dollar on the back end. And we were keen
to work with and partner with Ripple to get RLUSD and support the growth of, again, a well-regulated,
well-thought-through and well-appreciated stablecoin. And so that dovetails into what I'm kind of excited about,
although it pivots a little bit into the thing that I spoke about last, but obviously we launched
a prediction market in December of last year. And it is, I think, top of mind for a lot of people
and certainly a lot of people in the space are sort of comparing it to what crypto looked like in, you know, 2013,
14, 15 or so. And I certainly think there are some parallels in terms of just starting to
scratch the surface. But, you know, going back to that broader point, I think one of the things
that we're super interested about is really leaning into, you know, the crypto community, the XRP community, and in general around the crossover
between prediction markets and contracts on crypto assets. And so we've certainly, again,
seen a high degree of interest in some of the, it's hard to say, more traditional contracts in the prediction space, given how
relatively nascent it is. But the opportunity for our clients to come on to Gemini, fund
with crypto and be able to deploy that either in stablecoin or crypto and actually use that collateral for spot trading or perps trading or prediction market
trading is, I think, a pretty unique and interesting value prop. And, you know, again,
just being part of early markets here feels very much like the early days of crypto. And I am very
keen to sort of see how we continue to innovate in the crypto
native space while also doing the same in the prediction market space. Awesome. Well, thank you
so much, Brad. And in that kind of vein, I hear a lot about kind of meeting users where they're at.
And I'll move over to Rob Robinson here from Wormhole. And I guess to reiterate briefly,
Wormholehole the leading
interoperability platform connecting tradfi and the internet economy over 70 billion dollars in
value transfer across more than 40 blockchains obviously gigantic um robinson from your
perspective what role does interoperability uh kind of the multi-chain access play in making
xrp and rlusd more useful for real applications
um in addition to what you can already do you know hold trade things like that
yeah absolutely and i know it's been a little bit since i did a mic check so king solomon
confirm you can still hear me all right yes sir you are loud and clear great um yeah maybe what
we could do is just take a little bit of a step back because I feel like the word interoperability is like a lot of times one of those words that people kind of like almost fully get, but maybe there's a little bit of confusion.
I think what we do at Wormhole and solving this issue of interoperability is really nothing new as it pertains to other industries.
So what do I mean by that? In almost like every large
industry, we see some type of interoperability, right? The idea that like two different systems
can work together, right? They don't inherently communicate in the same way, but they can work
together. A good example is actually the banking system, right? Like you have all these different
banks with different databases, different ways, you know, different processes, et cetera.
But you need a way to wire money or send
money between them. So that is, in essence, interoperability. We see this with transportation
systems in our daily lives, in whatever city we're in, they kind of all have to work together,
the bus, the metro, et cetera, or healthcare system with your data. So interoperability is
all around us. And when we started Wormhole, I guess, you know, almost five years ago now,
the idea that there would be multiple blockchains was actually not the status quo. Uh, there was a
big school of thought that everything would be on one blockchain, right? Whether it was XRPL,
whether it was Ethereum. Uh, and I think it's kind of safe to say that now we live very much so in a multi-chain world. Of course, on this call today, we believe and are seeing a lot of that activity go to XRPL, but there will be other blockchains. And wehole is a secure and decentralized way to send information between XRPL and Ethereum and Solana and insert whatever blockchain you want, right?
RLUSD. I think maybe focusing on the asset for a second, RLUSD, I think, has a very good
opportunity at challenging the incumbents, right? Incumbents being maybe a USDT, a USDC.
I think that the resources, the backing, et cetera, are there to challenge it. However,
it has been kind of within a silo of Ethereum and XRPL and, you know, the sidechain.
And that's great.
But we want to get it to is we want to increase the addressable market, right?
You want to with an asset, your goal is to get it in as many hands as possible.
So whether that's, you know, institutional or maybe off chain or ways to, you know, for payments like, you know, via employment platforms, etc.
But you also want it to be integrated with as many blockchains as possible, right?
Each blockchain has its own applications.
It has its own users.
You know, it has all these things that increase the demand for the asset.
So by going to these chains, you grow RLUSD.
And I think maybe a good example to, to kind of, um, um, drive the point home.
We recently, you know, you can think of wormhole sometimes as a multi-chain asset issuer.
We recently issued an asset on another chain. Uh, it was on, it was on Solana actually.
And it grew the wallet holder based on that chain in like 48 hours by like 10,000 new holders.
Right. So that's an example of like all of a sudden now
RLUSD is being held by so many different, you know, investors or users, etc. And can be integrated
in so many different assets. And so that's really the role we play with RLUSD. Obviously,
to your point, King Solomon, we're working with XRPL as well. So we want to export RLUSD. But
when it comes to XRPL, you want to
import as many assets as possible, as many users as possible to the XRPL. You want it to be
connected to this broader ecosystem. And so we're able to do that as well by connecting XRPL to the
40 plus blockchains we're connected to today. And I guess to finish my point is that that helps bring
things like, of course, more stable coins, but also institutional assets, right? Like Biddle,
BlackRock's tokenized fund, uses wormhole to travel between chains. And, you know, connecting
to XRPL, Biddle can then travel to XRPL. Yeah, I think it's huge. I love your points on
interoperability. It's like, we're not here in 2026, emailing each other from Yahoo to Gmail, but you're talking about how amazing we're just emailing. But looking forward, you know, what are you most excited about for Wormhole, for XRP, for RLUSD in a multi-chain context? And whether that be developers or institutions or ecosystem players,
what should people be paying attention to in kind of the multi-chain context?
Yeah, maybe I'll speak very like, focus on the metrics of or the specifics of RLUSD because we've
been working very, we've been working a lot with XRP and XRPL as well, but just as of the past month or two to get the RLUSD multi-chain launch in place, I've been focused on this one a lot in particular.
And I said this a little bit before, but maybe I'll bring this up again.
But I do believe RLUSD has a shot, again, to challenge these incumbents.
to challenge these incumbents, right?
You know, USDC, USDT,
they've got kind of the early mover advantage on their side.
And there is definitely a network effects aspect
when it comes to stable coins.
You're able to get more integrations
in the hands of more users
and that begets more liquidity, more liquidity, et cetera.
However, I do think RLUSD,
as it's able to move to these other chains natively and be integrated with the apps on other chains, we will start to see a lot more growth, right?
I think we saw a couple months ago, Eclipse a billion.
You know, I'm really watching that issuance number and watching the impact, you know, RLUSD going multi-chain will have, right?
Because there's a lot of different applications on, you know, think of all these other chains, Avalanche, Solana, et cetera. And, you know, thinking about Solana, maybe I don't
want to get too into the weeds right now, but, you know, I don't know that they want USDC maybe as
much. Hey, King Solomon, can you still hear me? We hear you. Yep. Okay.
Sorry.
Sorry about that.
I had a, we're good now.
But anyway, what I'm trying to say is like RLUSD has a good opportunity to become maybe
the main stable coin on Solana.
And so, and then there can be kind of a somewhat of a new relationship with what is a competitor
to XRPL.
So I guess to speak specifically, King Solon,
I'm very excited about RLUSD's opportunity for growth here
and have been focused on that a lot lately.
And then maybe if you think about XRPL, right?
XRPL has historically been,
I think as of maybe the past year,
the access to other markets,
access to other blockchains has started to open up but it's
been this you know really vibrant community of investors of builders uh uh that has on maybe it
maybe I shouldn't say it but like has been kind of siloed a little bit right like it's been siloed
to xrpl it's been it's been siloed to uh it hasn't had the opportunity for like users from other
chains or assets from
other chains to come in. And so by making XRPL, like opening up that connectivity,
I think we'll see a lot more asset inflow and a lot more applications that want to build
multi-chain and add XRPL as that like a multi-chain hub. So I've already been talking to a lot of
teams in the XRP community, a lot of developers about this. We have some plans. So I've already been talking to a lot of teams in the XRP community, a lot of developers about this.
We have some plans.
So I'm excited to kind of open up XRPL,
and that's coming very soon from our side.
That's awesome, Robinson.
Because this is one of the things that people are typically not aware.
It's not about going from one to another.
It's bidirectional, right? So if there
is a lot of demand for doing something, let's say on the XRP ledger, because let's say the lending
protocol is out and there is like a very attractive rates for borrowing, that's of course very
interesting for people to come here and do that. Exactly. Exactly. Sorry, go ahead, Beth. Yeah, yeah.
And so one thing I would love maybe to hear a little bit about,
if you could mention, because for me personally,
it was like one of the fascinating things that specifically you guys
that were behind is maybe you can,
as for sort of as a community contribution that you guys did,
maybe you can just very high level, but not too technical, of course,
touch on NTT, the native token transfer protocol that you guys developed for the ecosystem.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I will try to not get too into the weeds here.
But I did bring up a little bit about the history of multi-chain, right?
right? It's only been about, you know, we could argue the specifics, but let's say roughly,
It's only been about, you know, we could argue the specifics, but let's say roughly,
roughly five years since we've had, you know, a lot of multiple, multiple chains with activity.
And, um, you know, that, that's, it's, that's been, yeah, multiple that there's been multiple
chains with a lot of activity, et cetera. So you probably had five years of like real multi-chain
type, uh, you know, back and forth activity. And so with that came a demand
to send assets or issue assets back and forth, right? So if you, the thought experiment here is
if I want my asset on XRPL, but it's only on Ethereum today, right? I have ETH on Ethereum
or something like that. How do I get it to XRPL? And I don't want to go through a centralized
exchange. I don't want a KYC. I want to do it on chain. I want to do it in a centralized way.
There wasn't really a way to do that five years ago. So what happened was we created
what we would call like a token bridge. So maybe some folks on the call are familiar with the term
bridge. You're able to bridge your asset from one chain to another. Without getting too technical, this was a good solution at the time. But what it did is it created multiple versions
of the same asset. So if you think about it, like another thought experiment, think about looking at
your banking app today, whatever your local currency is, let's say USD or Euro, whatever,
imagine having like four different types of the same asset, right? And they're not fungible with
one another. They're almost like in different accounts. That was a lot of what crypto was in
2020, 2021, 2022. You'd have your wallet, you'd have four different types of stable coins,
and they all would have maybe a prefix or suffix to tell you what chain they came from.
So essentially, we solved the problem of how do you get your asset
to another chain? And this is all bridge providers, by the way. But we also created another one,
which was the term people will use is liquidity fragmentation. But essentially, it's that
visualization I just gave you. You have multiple versions of the same asset. For a lot of reasons,
this is a horrible experience. There's downstream to how you build liquidity, how you just use the asset, etc.
So what we've done over the past two years is we said, hey, how do we essentially how
do we solve this externality of the original problem and create a system where you can
issue assets across all chains natively, not in this kind of like locked, you know, liquidity fragmentation way.
And so we created what's called NTT, Native Token Transfers. And that essentially just sits on top of
the way a token is issued on any given chain. It interacts with it. So you're able, the long story
short is you're able to keep one version, let's say XRP, we're all familiar with that, or RLUSD.
This is what we're doing with RLUSD
in particular, there's only ever going to be one version of RLUSD across every chain it's issued on.
And the history, if you think back to what I just said, if we didn't have this solution,
and let's say RLUSD wanted to go issue on Avalanche or another chain, Arbitrum,
there's a possibility, depending on how many issuers,
there could be like five versions and it wouldn't be nearly as successful, right? A DEX would be
like, oh my gosh, I don't want to, which version do I use? RLUSD X or RLUSD Y? And then users would
be like, which one do I hold? RLUSD Z or A? And you have all of this fragmentation that doesn't
make an asset successful. So because ntt and rlusd now
using ntt we're able to solve that problem from the start to ensure the most success possible
honestly not even for rlusd but but any asset so we're super excited about it and this was also
like all the accounting because typically you have this accounting problem then where you have like
oh now we have maybe more tokens in circulation than you should be able to back, right?
Yep, it's a burn and mint solution.
So it burns and mints across all the chains.
And I think the other thing too is,
at Wormhole, we really try to adhere
to a lot of like, you know, crypto ethos.
So it's completely open source.
So anyone can come pick this up.
You don't even actually have to use Wormhole security in it.
Although we have it there as default because we think you will use it So anyone can come pick this up. You don't even actually have to use Wormhole security in it,
although we have it there as default because we think you will use it
because we have been building the security model
for five plus years and think it's very good.
But if you don't want to, you don't have to.
So this is open source,
a tool for anyone to use,
no vendor lock-in.
And yeah, I think it's something
that the team's pretty proud of.
That's why I was asking
because that's specifically interesting as it's open source and it's basically a community contribution from you guys.
So that's great, which you also use.
Well, Solomon, I think we're good to go for the transition. yeah i definitely want to give a kind of reiterate a gigantic thank you um to uh ashish burla
from ever north we had brad vopni from gemini and robinson uh from wormhole and super excited
to see the continued uh innovation and adoption as we move forward it's hard to believe that we're in 2026 but as we move forward into
2026 and um beyond um that if you want to walk us into the the next part here that'd be awesome
absolutely so we're not right we did the america's xrp session here and we transitioned down to the
spotlight of community projects and we will bring up now a few community projects we had
to talk about what they are doing,
how they're contributing to the ecosystem,
and what they're up to,
just to get some on-the-ground insights.
And let me get a few up.
I guess as a sidebar, Vett,
we have, I think, four projects coming up, right, Vett?
So we're probably going to ask everybody to make sure they, you know,
around four or five minutes each because I know at the top of the hour
we'll be transitioning, but we definitely want to extract as much value out
from everybody.
And Vet, I'll let you kick the first one off and stop rambling here.
Yeah, I think we can immediately start with, I think Sloppy's behind
the first Ledger account. Sloppy? Yeah, what's up? How we doing, I think Sloppy is behind the first Ledger account.
Sloppy?
Yeah, what's up?
How are we doing, Solomon?
What's up?
Nothing, just living.
How's your day going, guys?
It's been a pretty amazing session so far.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, we're curious, what are you guys up to in the ecosystem?
What are you guys building on the XRP Ledger?
Maybe you can give
us the latest and greatest yeah no for for those who don't know me my name is sloppy or you know
by my real name Chris I am one of the founders of the first ledger and also Joey wallet now what
are we we are a token launchpad decentralized exchange as well as Joey wallet is a full self
self custodial wallet. So again,
you can store your XRP and XRPO assets on there and it makes your whole
journey onto the XRPO as seamless as possible.
It takes around 10 seconds to create a wallet.
So now if we're going to go from first ledger to Joey wallet what we're doing
on first ledger right now,
we're kind of going through a total platform transformation
to make it as intuitive and seamless as possible
when it comes to new users and existing users on the XRPL.
We want to make sure your journey from point A to point B
is as seamless as possible.
So allowing that to be either you know, either mobile experience,
desktop experience, you get all the data that you want to look for, as well as not having to think
when it comes to purchasing assets on the XRPL. Now, when it comes to future initiatives, where
we're going to be rolling something out come in March, probably March 2nd, we made a tweet about
it today, but it's going to hopefully incentivize
more people to interact with liquidity pools in the AMM on the XRPL. Seeing as it's like fairly
new technology for us, roughly like what a year and a half old, it only makes sense to kind of
teach people how to use it. And I guess one of the best ways to teach people is to incentivize teaching too.
So we're going to have some pretty cool programs going on around that.
So just be on the lookout.
We don't want to share too much on that front yet, but at least on Joey Wallet, we're almost a year old now,
fairly new into the ecosystem, at least on that front.
Roughly, I think we're a little bit over 15,000 downloads
at this point.
And, you know, the main goal was to allow users to have a similar experience when it
comes to onboarding to the XRPO, as you would experience on like, let's say Ethereum or
Solana.
So, you know, wallet creation, again, takes roughly 10 seconds, full self-custodial wallet
audits and all that good stuff.
And, you know, it's a very intuitive experience when it comes to actually interacting with the chain.
Now, again, what's coming with that?
Well, we're exploring some different things on what XRP users can do with their money.
you know, Ripple tapping in with, well, Hyperliquid.
You know, Ripple tapping in with, well, Hyperliquid.
That's kind of like a hint that we're trying to look into
and maybe allow users to deploy funds over there
once XRPL support does come.
Looking at EVM sidechain support
and just trying to, you know,
bring as many users to the mainnet as possible
and actually deploy funds on the XRPL
rather than take them off chain so
long-winded response right there but we got a lot on the roadmap and a lot of fun things coming
yeah i love to hear it love to hear it um this is the time to build and um you definitely got you
guys are definitely doing that definitely follow um the account if you want to stay up to date with it.
I'm looking forward to increased activity and more coming to the XRPL.
Going with this, there is actually a project I'm really interested in here is T-54.
And I know from IO last year, we talked about agentic payments. It really would be a great fit with the XRPL.
And then I saw the partnership with Ripple.
And so I'm really curious to hear from you, T54, about your project.
And why is it such a great fit with the XRPL?
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks for the host.
Thank you for having us. And thank you for Ripple and XRPO ecosystem. So I'm Chandler, the co-founder of T5FOR Labs. So we are an AI fintech company. As you said, we are trying to solve the agentic payment problem. And we went through the XRPO Accelerator in 2025. So what T5-4 is doing, we're building the trust infrastructure
for agent economy. So as agents start moving real money, pay for data, settled invoices,
managing funds, someone needs to answer a question about how can I trust my AI agents with my money,
right? And what about my identity?
How to solve the risk assessment?
How to secure the payment rails
for those autonomous agents are running everywhere?
So before I dive into detail,
I'm glad that I'm right after a shift session,
right after Evernorth.
So we recently announced a strategic collaboration
with Evernorth, the largest institutional XRP treasury.
So to power their AI-driven autonomous treasury operations on XRPL.
So we are bringing the verification, risk assessment, and compliance to their AI-powered treasury management.
Back to your question, like, what's the problem we are solving?
you a question like, what's the problem we are solving? So if you look at right now, when an
agent need to buy something like a data, a compute, a tool, there will be a paywall. What I mean by
that is human needs to log in, right? To pay for subscription, to use their credit card, to do some
manual approval. That breaks the entire point of autonomy.
And quick context about X402 as well, for people who have ever seen that,
X402 is an open payment protocol that takes HTTP old 402 payment required status and turn that code into an actual payment rails.
And it's very, very powerful because when an agent hit a paid resource,
the server can respond with the X402 request
and the agent see that price,
pay that money, and then get access.
So there's no need to have accounts,
no API keys, no subscriptions, purely agent native.
And what we have building right now is XRPL with X402 facilitator. So the piece that connect the protocol to XRPL. So what it does is,
so agent can pay per use with XRP or RRUSD and settle on chain in seconds. For example, use a real
live example here. So you may ask your agent someday, say, hey, could you help me pull
NVIDIA's latest earning transcript? Read some two proprietary paid research report and
then compare them. So if you're doing without agents,
you need to tell Bloomberg and pay for subscription,
download the things,
and then you have to stop everything before sign up and finish the payments.
But with our facilitator,
the agents handle that autonomously.
First, they hit a paid data source.
They see a price, a few cents,
a few dollars. They can pay with XRP or RRUSD on XRP. Then they get the results. Keep going.
No subscription. Pay only when you use it. So why this is so important on XRPL and why we think this is uniquely positioned to make XRPL super competitive is Asian payments are tiny and frequent.
So most of the rail punish that because they are paying by a percentage fee, right?
And there are some minimal charges.
And there are some minimal charges.
But for XRPL, it doesn't.
But for XRPL, it doesn't.
It has a fraction of a cent, like three to five seconds settlement,
continuous uptime.
That makes this few cents per request payment super viable at scale.
And also, we are utilizing our USD that make the transaction even faster.
So what's next?
We officially are launching the XRPL X402 facilitator
in coming weeks, open to developers building agents that need to pay and API provider who
want to pay per call pricing, anyone who want to use XRP to be the settlement layer for
agent native payments, you can reach out to us. So with the closing
notes here, so not every blockchain is built for payments. XRPL does. And not every blockchain
is native for agents, and XRPL has the huge potential. So a lot of network optimized for
the smart contract computation, so the value transfer on a secondary function.
But XRPL is the opposite.
They're designed from day one to move value.
The fees are super low.
The segment speed is super fast.
And especially after the SEC, everybody know that XRP has the clear regulatory standings
that most crypto infrastructure doesn't.
Yeah.
So that's why I think we're deciding to commit on XRPL.
And thank you for having us.
Well, that's awesome.
The settlement layer for agent-to-agent and agentic payments, XRPL, that's a good soundbite.
I want to ask, let's move on to Centauri here,
and we'll try to get four or five minutes with each of you guys, but I'll stop rambling. Centauri
would love to learn what you guys are building for institutional DeFi, how that ties in, and
what you're looking forward to for the future of building towards XRP and RLUSD utilization.
the building towards XRP and RLUSD utilization.
Great guys, thanks.
Thank you for the opportunity.
Just really quickly, Centura is the institutional DeFi layer
specifically to the Ripple community.
We are the DeFi integration partner for RLUSD.
So we've been there since dollar one of RLUSD,
two billion and a half.
So appreciate all the community support getting there and really excited about what the use cases for RLUSD and the size and where we're heading in 2026.
A lot of exciting updates to come.
Tangential to that, we have built a protocol called Firelight.
we have built a protocol called Firelight.
It launched in December,
and we are announcing for pre-lockup deposits of XRP
to earn points at this point,
and it'll be yield once the protocol goes fully live in Q2.
I can announce that we're doing another cap raise
on the week of June 23rd,
so we're going to double the size of stakers.
So from a high level, Firelight allows people with XRP to stake their XRP into the protocol and earn yield.
We are targeting about 3% to 5% for XRP.
And I think one of the drivers, describe is how are we generating the shield?
So what Firelight is, is the next innovation of a insurance slash cover protocol. The idea is that
Firelight will allow XRP holders to stake their XRP. And that will allow Firelight to write DeFi insurance contracts
against large protocols, pools, bridges, oracles at scale.
Now, I probably didn't.
The first question I would get is, you know,
why would I post my super valuable XRP
and let DGEN use it as an insurance contract.
So the reality is the insurance product that XFI or that Firelight is building
is very much to pivot and focus the future of DeFi.
DeFi is going to grow in the next year or two around this meta around neobanks.
You have PayPal, you have Ripple, potentially through G-Treasury,
Revolute, Robinhood, all looking to move to this neobank model where we replace
fiat deposits in cash and earning treasury yields to stablecoin deposits and earning DeFi yields.
And I think the biggest blocker for this to unleash at scale is Web2 people don't understand
smart contract risk. Here at Centura, we've been managing risk at scale over 2 billion.
We manage currently, we've been managing this for five years and always returned our clients
money. So we feel very comfortable pricing this risk. But the reality is the insurance that we will be selling
is to tick the box for neobanks to get over the hump
and really deploy its scale into DeFi.
The protocols that we're insuring,
think of Morpho, Ave, Euler,
the assets that are in that stack,
USDC, USDT, RLUSD, Athena assets, battle tested assets with proper risk models.
And at the end of the day, do they really need this insurance? Probably not. But does it make it,
does it make a Web2 firm more comfortable launching a product where they feel comfortable they're not
going to be able, they're not going to lose their clients' funds. Now, on the other side, on the Ripple side, you know,
why would you do this, right? And I think this is probably a question I'd like to answer directly.
If you stake, right now, on this call, if you could stake XRP in Aave, would you do it? And I
would think the large majority of people here would do it. If you could stake your XRP, post
your XRP in Aave and earn 4%, would you do it?
I think that group grows even larger.
That's essentially what you're doing.
Because you can't supply XRP into Aave and you can't earn 4% even if you could, this is the utility unlock for XRP.
And the risk that you're taking is simply the same risk you'd take if you deployed into Euler, Aave, Morpho, but you can't.
So that's the value attribution to both the buyers of insurance and the scale of this is billions.
The demand for this insurance is quite large.
So this is an organic yield that's going to scale for the XRP community.
Sorry to run over.
No, you're totally fine.
I know we did an interview with Firelight
over on Genfinity like a month ago or a couple weeks ago too, so people can go and check out
and get a deeper dive. But thank you so much. No, I think it's super awesome. There's a huge
opportunity obviously for XRP and RLUSD in kind of the DeFi flows. I want to move over to Arculus
here in just the last couple of minutes.
Security obviously is one of the biggest must-haves, probably the biggest must-have after compliance in this entire industry.
Arculus, what are you guys building? And sorry to ask you to be a little bit brief on it.
No worries. I'll be super brief. I'm Tom Lennon, the head of products at Arculus.
We actually make that beautiful Gemini XRP card. We make most of the metal cards in the world.
We also have our own hardware wallet on a metal payment card form factor.
Two things that I wanted to mention today in the time is that we recently came out with an XR, a beautiful XRP branded hardware wallet.
Again,
on a metal payment card form factor,
you can see that at get arculus.com.
Cause we are big supporters of the XRP community.
And the other thing that we do again,
cause we're excited about RLUSD and the potential for,
for real consumer payments.
We've also built a point of sale integration and a point of sale device that allows you to tap to pay, take a card with Arcula software on it
and your private keys on it, and essentially tap it to a point-of-sale terminal.
So if you think about the way people actually are able to pay
with digital assets in physical locations today,
like I've been in crypto for a long time,
and I think I paid with digital assets in a store
like once and that was because I sought it out. Now today there are some payment cards like
Betamask and Cast and these things that let you pay with digital assets over the traditional
payment rails. We think that's fantastic and we do a lot of that business but we also think there's
a place for doing direct on-chain payments. And most of those direct on-chain payments today happen via QR code, which is honestly kind of a crappy way to check out.
I mean, take your phone out and take a picture of a thing is a bad checkout experience.
So what we've done is essentially created a tap-to-pay checkout experience, direct on-chain for RLUSD and other digital assets.
And if you want to see it, you can actually see it, a live demo of it at bit.ly slash RLUSD and other digital assets. And if you want to see it, you can actually see it,
a live demo of it at bit.ly slash RLUSD tap.
That's RLUSD TAP, Bitly link.
And you could actually see what it looks like.
It looks like a normal debit card transaction.
But what you're actually doing is sending RLUSD directly over the XRPL blockchain.
Takes about two or three seconds and you don't have to take out your phone.
You have to scan a QR code.
You literally just take, in my case,
I actually use my XRP card,
tap to that point of sale terminal,
enter your PIN,
and your transaction goes through.
All on the XRPL blockchain.
Awesome.
Vett, you want to lead us out here?
We want to definitely thank everybody that joined today,
but Vett, you lead us out.
100%.
It was an amazing session.
Thanks, everybody who joined for the one with Ashish,
Brett, and Robinson.
And we're going to lead here now with Monica
who's going to talk about how XRP matters to Ripple's business.
And so stay tuned for this session.
And yeah, thanks, everybody.
Yes, thank you, everyone, for the last session.
That was really great.
I'm excited to continue the conversation.
I'm Jacqueline Melanick, the founder and CEO of Token Relations,
and I'm excited to be here with Monica Long,
the president of Ripple, to discuss XRP at the core of Ripple's business. Monica, how are you?
Hi, Jacqueline. I'm great. Thank you so much for having me. Hey, everyone out there. Thanks for
joining. Yeah, I'm super excited to do this, and it's great to catch up right now. To start off, I know you have had an interesting journey and growth at Ripple. Can you kind of
walk us through how you went from your initial role to now president? Sure, I've had the ride
of a lifetime. Very lucky person. So I joined Ripple in 2013, just about a year after its founding.
And my introduction was through Chris Larson, co-founder and then CEO.
He's now our executive chairman.
And I had had the privilege of working for Chris when he was CEO of Prosper prior to Ripple.
So that was my introduction. He was like magnificently excited about the revolution underway with crypto and what Ripple was working on and was very convincing with his vision. So I
decided to jump feet first. It was a pretty nascent industry at the time. And so I started on the communications front and then later grew a marketing team.
Around 2020, we created a focused effort around funding and supporting developers in an ecosystem of partners building on XRP Ledger outside of
Ripple. And so that's called Ripple X. I know you heard from some of my colleagues earlier.
So yeah, we launched that in 2020. And now in my current role as president, I'm responsible for
our core business, which includes Ripple X, but then also payments and our custody product,
as well as our stablecoin, our LUSD.
Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of really great moving parts in that front. Monica,
how do you think the industry has really evolved since you first got into the space?
Yeah, I mean, a lot has changed. There's been so much progress and maturation,
and then some fundamentals have stayed the same, which is a good thing.
So what's changed, I would say, is, I mean, regulatory clarity pops of had a domino effect just on institutional
embrace of the technology. I would also say, I mean, on that note, institutions taking
the technology very seriously as a core part of the future financial system, not looking at it as, you know,
a flash in the pan or a side project that belongs in the lab. So I think maturation,
institutional adoption, those are kind of the themes that come to mind. And I would say what
hasn't changed is the industry's unified vision of the future and our unified mission of enabling an Internet of value.
And we really think, yeah, blockchain can change the way money moves around the world.
Yeah, no, I love that. And I agree. It definitely can. And we're starting to see that happen. Right.
And I think with that in mind, what are kind of your key priorities for Ripple's business in 2026 then?
We are launching into 2026 after a banner year in 2025.
And I just was mentioning I joined in 2013.
I can say 2025 was best year ever, best year yet.
I can say 2025 was best year ever, best year yet.
So of course, those who followed along
know we've acquired four companies,
or we acquired four companies last year.
We also expanded our kit of licenses
to do payments and other virtual asset activities.
So we're now licensed in more than 75 licenses
around the world.
And some of those are really significant for opening up new markets for our payments offering and other activity like that.
So now looking at 2026, we're first and foremost focused on integrating our acquisitions and seeing the, you know, the deal theses play out and come
to life. And we want to build on the growth and momentum we were having, especially in the back
half of 2025, on customer acquisition and adoption and usage of our products. So like, for example, with payments, in the second half of the year, we were seeing double digit growth in payment volume month on month.
So we're seeing this really nice hockey stick curve in payment volume growth.
last year was really its first year being in the market.
And we are now, we have now crossed $1.5 billion in market cap.
It's, you know, firmly a top five stable coin.
And then on the custody front in this, you know,
our flagship custody product is primarily,
it was built for banks and that's our main customer.
And it was kind of a quiet first part of the year for digital asset custody and banks.
And there was like this clear before and after snapshot of before Genius Act and after of how serious banks got about engaging with firms like Ripple.
And so we saw dozens of RFPs requests for proposals coming
from banks for custody solutions. So I can't give you the names yet, but I can say you can expect
more good news to come on bank adoption for Ripple. Okay. So we can definitely expect more
of this in 2026 then.
Yeah, I can't wait to share with you.
Okay, very, very exciting.
Yeah, I know when all the M&A activity was happening in 2025,
we wrote about it at Token Relations, but it's just super exciting.
And I think kind of going to the point of this conversation, it goes back to the core of Ripple's business.
But on the front of XRP and XRPL,
how do you think those two kind of play
into Ripple's product strategy,
both in the past, but now looking to the future?
Yeah, I mean, we're winding the tape
back to the founding of the company.
Like XRP and the ledger are our reason for being.
The purpose of Ripple is to be building use cases, taking the technology and applying
it to solving real world problems.
So we call it our North Star, like that this is kind of what guides us in a lot of our
in a lot of our product strategy and decision-making.
product strategy and decision making.
Things that I'm excited about on our roadmap for this year,
one is payments on DEX.
And of course, payments already happen
on the Decentralize Exchange.
You all know that.
But with our licensed product,
so this payments offering that a lot of our customers are using for stablecoin
cross-border payments, we want to bring more of that flow directly onto the decentralized exchange.
And an interesting trend we've been talking about at Ripple is just the proliferation of stablecoins.
Even take just US dollar as the currency there's all these different
issuers now and i think back to the early days um talking to david schwartz and arthur britto
like their vision for the decks on extra ledger was you know in the future so many different
assets will be tokenized money will be tokenized going to be all these different issuers. And depending on the currency cross or the exchange, it's going to be a mess to finding the liquidity.
So XRP is built into the protocol as this bridge asset.
And you can auto bridge really seamlessly through XRP.
So we're bringing it back to the roots of how this protocol and the DEX were built.
So I'm super excited about that one.
Another one is payments credit.
So to explain that one, we know that in the world of payments, so if you're a payment service provider, it's really common that you would have like overnight credit or short-term
credit to be able to ensure the appropriate funding for that payment. That's super common.
And for those who maybe have been following us for a while, you may remember we had a line of
credit offering back in the day. So our idea is to build on that customer need, that insight into that customer
need for credit or financing for payments and match it with holders of XRP who might be interested
in putting that XRP to work and earning more yield using the lending protocol. So this would, you know, I know lending
protocol is still up for vote, but, you know, we're fingers crossed, really hopeful and gung-ho that
that will be enacted as an amendment. So that's another one to come. And then the last thing I'll
mention is a lot of the banks we're working with, I mentioned we've been responding to a lot of their RFPs around custody.
The banks are not just interested in custody digital assets.
They're really keen on pushing into tokenization, whether that's tokenizing deposits or different funds or even equities, bonds, etc.
And so our custody product enables that through the product.
And of course, XRP Ledger is, I mean,
we believe the best blockchain for institutions to be using.
And so we see our custody customers putting more of those
kind of mature assets onto XRP L.
Yeah, I mean, with the front of tokenization and payments
and everything you've talked about so far,
do you see this as like the key use cases taking off
or are there other areas that you're kind of monitoring too?
Yeah. I would say the two kind of big bets that we have are the use cases that we think are real killer use cases for not just blockchain, but specifically XRP Ledger and XRP are payments and capital markets. So trying, you know,
kind of using the efficiency of blockchain and either stablecoin or tokenized funds
or digital assets
to make post-trade settlement in particular
a lot smoother and more efficient
and also collateral management
within the context of capital markets.
And that's, I think earlier we were talking about Aviva.
We also last year talked about a partnership with DBS and Franklin Templeton.
And this is the flavor of more of what's to come between our Ripple X team and our Ripple Prime team.
to come between our Ripple X team and our Ripple Prime team. Okay, for sure. I think also another
Okay, for sure.
thing I'm thinking of on this front, Monica, is like what are the keys here to really unlock more
of this activity on XRPL? That's a great question. That's like the trillion, multi-trillion dollar
question, right? So I do believe regulatory clarity was an imperative.
And I can really see that clearly in hindsight now, because we were so early to the market with
payments on blockchain and institutional use cases on blockchain that we were making progress along
the way. But I could see this like floodgate opening last year.
Post-Genius Act, of course, now clarity is on the table.
But I think those, the clarity from the regulator really matters because a lot of the institutions that we talk to, they get it.
They get the need, they get the solution and how it fits.
They get the solution and how it fits.
But they're, you know, they're not in the business of taking on that kind of technology risk unless it's clear what they're going to get from the regulator.
I also think another aspect is interoperability.
We're talking about, you know, the proliferation of U.S. dollar stable coins.
Another aspect of that is many, many chains. And so for the internet of
value to be a real thing, these blockchains have to work seamlessly together. You have to be able
to transfer assets across different chains and liquidity pools. And on the more tactical
blocking and tackling front,
there are certain features that institutions need.
So when you look at XRPL,
a lot of what had been already built in is,
it's built for financial use cases.
But there's things you've seen us developing in the past year, the letting protocol being one,
but also permission domains,
confidential transfers, credentials, like things like that, that are important to make the
blockchain usable by institutions. I mean, on the institutional front,
what do you think is really missing that these institutions want to see on XRPL before they move over?
Yeah. And I think like, you know, the, the features are one aspect, of course, you, you can't really
do a lot of, uh, you can't implement many financial use cases without the high quality
assets being available and then
liquidity. So that's like, you know, our Ripple X team really focuses on partnerships that will
bring high quality assets on and build liquidity, get that flywheel going. I also think, you know,
the peer validation matters a lot. And it can be like, let's be honest, it can be some FOMO
out there in the institutional realm. So I think seeing leaders go for it, like DBS or Aviva,
or, you know, we have another partnership with MasterCard. I think that matters a lot. That kind of peer validation gets them to jump in.
I think another question I have kind of transitioning maybe to the XRP side of things, given the conversations about XRP at the core of Ripple's business, too, I want to weave this in, is like, how will XRP integrate into Ripple's new lines of business?
Yeah, and here you're probably referring to Ripple Prime, Ripple's new lines of business. Yeah.
And here you're probably referring to Ripple Prime, Ripple Treasury.
Yeah.
So it's just the beginning.
We're really excited about the potential here.
But with Ripple Treasury, this business serves more than 1,000 corporates
who are managing trillions of dollars of capital.
And at kind of the highest level, working with, you know, plugging into our infrastructure
can help these corporates unlock more idle capital and also move money faster, more
transparently, more reliably.
In working with that team, they've been really quick to market with, they have some customers
who have actually come to them asking about digital assets.
This is like a great sign that serious corporate treasurers of large firms are inquiring about
digital asset strategies within their treasury. So of course, the first asset to
offer them is XRP. So we have some pilots already standing up around that. And with Ripple Prime,
since we've signed that deal, they've already seen XRP deposits increase more than 100% in the last two quarters of 2025. They're also looking at
expanding the collateralized lending market for XRP amongst our clients.
Where do you see Ripple a year from now then, Monica? Where do you see the market a year from
now? If you can give us an outlook that far out, I know things can change, but I'd love to hear your perspective there.
Yeah, I do. I wish I had a crystal ball.
We're jamming. We're in such a good place. I mentioned the growth curve we're seeing
within payments. And also, we made a couple other acquisitions last year that were more
product-led, like Rail and Palisade. So those have kind of filled in and expanded the capabilities we can offer those clients to collect, hold,
swap, and pay out all through one interface with one provider. So I see Ripple a year from now,
this is going to be, I know I said 2025 was best year ever. This is going to be a better best year
I said 2025 was best year ever, this is going to be a better best year because we already have the
momentum coming into the year. We have the regulatory clarity. We have the growth going
in the right direction. And getting those license approvals, which we just announced between like
December and January in UK, Europe and Singapore, these are now markets that are open for us to directly onboard customers,
which we could not do last year. So I think it's going to be a really big year. The story for RLUSD
will be, you know, in a world of many and more and more stable coins, RLUSD will really stand out as, you know, top shelf regulated, but also highly utilized
within payments and capital markets. So we have that cooking with payments in our
Ripple Prime business too. I think you asked about the market. So I know, I know it's coming
off a year of up and to the right, up and to the right. It's always tough to go through a dip. And I mean, we've been around 13 years. I've been at the company 12. Like we've seen a lot of ups and downs, bears and bulls.
The institutional appetite hasn't gone away. So I take that as a really great sign.
We haven't slowed down in terms of banks who are engaging us, asset managers and payment companies.
So I think that despite what we might see showing up in the day-to-day volatility,
that at the end of the year, there will be really, really meaningful adoption and
progress on the use cases that we're focused on, at least payments and capital markets. And I think
that XRPL by the end of this year will be indisputably the institutional choice of blockchains.
Okay. I'm excited to see how everything pans out this year. Last thing, Monica, if you had to define the moment in 2026 for Ripple and XRP in a few words, how would you describe it?
I would say institutional adoption at scale.
Institutional adoption at scale.
Okay.
Yes. I love it. We'll revisit that December 31st to see how it played out. Yeah. A hundred percent. Amazing. Well, thank you, Monica,
for taking the time and thank you for joining me in this conversation for the last session of the
day. And for everyone listening in, there is still more content to come. So please join the APEX session happening later today. Amazing. Thank you so much, Jacqueline. Thanks everyone
for joining. Yes. Thank you.
Host
Ripple
from
Binance-Peg XRP
Speaker
Wormhole
from
Wormhole Bridge
