Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
XRP Community Day - APAC
Recorded: Feb. 12, 2026 Duration: 2:44:30Space Recording
Short Summary
The XRP ecosystem is witnessing significant growth and innovation, highlighted by strategic partnerships, project launches, and community engagement events. Key developments include the launch of Wrapped XRP on Solana, Uphold's new features enhancing XRP utility, and Assetto's tokenization of real-world assets, all contributing to a vibrant and expanding market.
Full Transcription
Thank you. so I'm going to go ahead and do it. Thank you. Music Thank you. so
oh so Thank you. foreign
. I Thank you. I Oh Thank you. Guten Morgen. Good morning, everyone.
Luke Judges here out of Hong Kong.
Looking forward to kicking off the APAC session today.
We've got a ton of great speakers.
Today we'll be kicking off primarily with Vibu from the Solana Foundation and Georgia from Hextrust.
I guess I'll give it over to you guys just quickly to do a couple of minutes introduction.
So, I mean, we can start with Vibu. I can't even say your name properly, man. Apologies for that.
On your role at the Solana Foundation and yeah how you how you're kind of interacting
with the xlp community i'd love to just kind of get a quick couple minutes on your role at the
solana foundation thank you luke is a warrior i don't know if people know but he's currently in
hong kong for a conference and his voice sounds really great.
You sound great, man.
Yeah, I'm the interim chief marketing officer of the Slana Foundation and also the chief product officer of the Slana Foundation.
Most of my time is behind the scenes is spent building products, especially,
you know, things related to our efforts around trading and assets.
And then a small portion of my portion of my time as well as managing things like our social
strategy and video strategy and events and things like that.
video strategy and events and things like that.
Hey, guys.
Cheers.
Hi, Georgia.
Yeah.
Hey, hey, hey, Vivo.
Absolutely.
Hi, everybody.
Thanks for having me.
So Georgia here, also based out of Hong Kong.
I am also Chief Product Officer at Xtrust,
as well as Head of custody, which means I oversee the licensed activity of custody assets for our clients,
institutional clients, as well as a chief product officer, of course,
overseeing all products and services that are rolled out,
that are rolled out, obviously through software and infrastructure from the company.
obviously through software and infrastructure from the company.
Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining both of you.
I know, actually, I think Vibi, you're over in the US.
Georgia, it was a pleasure to catch up with you in person yesterday in Hong Kong.
Thanks for making the time throughout your days and coming here to speak to the XRP community.
I'll start off with a couple of questions.
Primarily, I'll go to you first, Bebe.
From a Solana ecosystem's perspective,
I know you guys have obviously brought a number of other ecosystem assets to Solana.
It kind of is aligned with your strategy.
But what kind of changes for Solana as an ecosystem when kind of 2-1 assets such
as XRP becomes accessible to the developers building on your network? And what kind of
applications or use cases do you think that starts to unlock?
Yeah, sure. Thanks for the question. So we've been pretty focused over the last six months,
I would say, on onboarding what
we consider like high-quality assets.
Onto Solana.
Solana has a very robust DeFi ecosystem.
There's a lot of ways to use the assets on our network.
Obviously, trading is the tip of the iceberg, but in terms of lending, borrowing, all kinds of arbitrage
strategies, there's a lot of kind of utility around assets that are on Solana.
And we kind of started our journey with Bitcoin.
We have somewhere around like $500 or $600 million worth of Bitcoin on the network, which
is wrapped and redeemable one-for-one for Bitcoin, for many
different custodians.
That kind of effort was so successful that we just started thinking about how we could
bring more liquid assets into the ecosystem.
And obviously, XRP is easily one of the most liquid crypto assets in the world.
And we felt like it was something that would be, you know, right at home in our network.
And as we got to know you guys a bit better, we were really excited to work with Ripple and Hextrust on, you know,
... hopefully very soon, very shortly, we'll be actually launching this, and everyone that's
hopefully very soon, very shortly, we'll be actually launching this.
building on Solana at the DeFi layer can now use this Wrapped XRP, WXRP, as a primitive
across their products. And I don't know, this is a different time than it was a couple years ago.
I think the bridges are being built literally and metaphorically and I'm really
excited about this.
Thanks, man. Yeah, I think that there's a couple of different ways that assets can
move across chain these days. And I think this is a really exciting way that we're doing
this in terms of using Hextrust as a custodian for the underlying collateral. Georgia, could
you potentially speak to, obviously this depends heavily on a lot of infrastructure.
Could you explain Hextrust's role here, the regulated custody and issuance plays in enabling
a wrapped asset like the wrapped XRP for institutions and different market participants?
Absolutely. Yeah. So using licensed infrastructure and financial services to
bridge an asset like XRP over to an incredible ecosystem like Solana really comes down to two
things. One is collateral security and the second one is governance around issuance right so um using a licensed custody layer to facilitate rap it means that effectively
institution market participants that face x trust and and and want to wrap xrp over to different
ecosystems they they do it with knowing that uh their collateral so the base asset against which we made one-to-one,
wrapped XRP, is kept in the most secure infrastructure audited.
And when I say audited, I think it's very important, right?
We've seen so many, you know, issues, incidentals the past year,
and audits have more or less always been there, right it is a is a safety check in one specific point in time
regulated custodians such as ourselves we subject ourselves to almost not real
time audits but certifications like SOC 1, SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 2, SOC 1, SOC 2 are
basically certifications that and audits that have, you know,
counterparties like Deloitte sitting in our office for months at a time scrutinizing how we do things.
So it's not just about, you know, technology penetration testing and whatnot, but also about
how we basically manage private keys, which trickles down to how safe the collateral is.
So this is the first thing.
The second thing is management and governance around issuance.
So we manage the issuance of wrapped XRP through the very same custodial infrastructure that holds the base asset of XRP.
that holds the base asset of XRP.
This really means that managing the smart contract,
calling the smart contract, calling all the different functions
is completely not only role-based,
but also we can have all level of approvals across the organization.
But I also think the most important thing about this is that
to a certain extent,
the institutional centralized character of this means that um they're very to a certain extent institutional centralized character of
these means that there is accountability so if something goes wrong you know exactly where we
are you know exactly who we are and and there is accountability which i think is very important for
institutional uh participants yeah i think if something goes wrong, I think Vibu and myself will be knocking on your door on day one. It is very helpful to have someone like Xtrust accountable, who obviously have a great reputation in this space, have done this for a long time. So yeah, I really appreciate you playing a vital part in this liquidity ecosystem.
Viboo, as developers kind of start experimenting with new assets into the ecosystem, like right
now I think this is becoming more and more mature, but it feels like a little bit immature
in the journey.
I think there's probably opportunities to build almost custom applications around XRP
or Bitcoin or any other major and a tier one asset on different chains. So you could have an XRP app on Solana,
you could have a Solana app on XRP.
What kind of types of demand are you seeing so far
across these assets?
Obviously, it's probably primarily trading
and liquidity activity.
Are you seeing any kind of application-level use cases
beginning to emerge?
Or do you have a vision for
some obviously you're well established in the industry do you have a vision for some unlocks
at the application level that could be interesting for kind of other assets coming onto your
ecosystem yeah absolutely um yeah we uh like you said we do have, there's a lot of, there's a lot of like built-in utility here.
I think people should understand that assets like XRP have a dual function.
They are both, I'm not sure, I guess this is the Ripple, I don't want to give, I'm not trying to give financial advice, anything like that.
They have a dual function as a utility token at the base layer, but they also are basically a reserve asset investment asset for many others.
And those folks who hold these tokens, they oftentimes are looking for ways to put them to use, right? And so, like, probably, like, the most obvious thing that we're excited
about doing is offering yield on XRP. You can, you know, participate in borrow-in markets with
something like Camino on Solana, which is, like, a multi-billion dollar lending platform,
and earn interest, you know, directly on Solana,
which I think is pretty cool.
There's an opportunity as well to build trading pools in LP,
XRP, against other tokens on the network.
Obviously, there's obvious, there's very clear ones,
like, this is another conversation,
but something like XRP, RLUSD
as a pair, but also XRP against Sol, XRP against USDC, USAT, and many other stables.
Like Solana has, I think, something like $15 or $16 billion of stablecoins on the network
at the moment. And so for anyone that has like a substantive amount of XRP and is looking to just put that in motion and earn from that,
I think there's a lot of opportunity on Solana.
And I think there's also a lot of fun things to do here.
Solana is also a fun...
We do optimize for the dot...
We call it dot-fun economy.
And so I expect to see meme coin launch pads see, you know, meme coin launch pads with
WXRP as the base on the pair. I think these are like just, there's other ways to think
about it as kind of like the base currency, not just the utility, you know, token itself.
Thanks man. Yeah, super clear. Thanks, man.
Yeah, super clear.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity,
not just on Slotter,
but as the bridges get built
across multiple different blockchain ecosystems
to really build the utility,
liquidity and trust in XRP.
And I think, yeah,
it's great to have you guys
on the journey with us
kind of from day one
and look forward
to continuing working with you and Georgia.
Georgia, on the liquidity level, I think obviously we're kind of in the process of deploying
some initial liquidity, so it's early stages.
But it often determines like whether a new cost chain asset actually gains traction.
new cost chain asset actually gains traction. As WrappedXRP liquidity kind of comes online,
how does launching this with meaningful initial liquidity help create any
healthier market from day one? Like what does that unlock having that extra liquidity?
Yeah, no, that's a great question. Liquidity isn't really just about volume, but it really signals market quality.
Meaningful liquidity matters because it reduces volatility and slippage.
Early thin liquidity can create artificial volatility.
We can also deter serious participants from coming in.
Meaningful liquidity signals confidence or builds
confidence to participate, to commit capital. So I think it's really meaningful. Then another side
is also about the cross-chain element that you have mentioned. And I think something that in
general ecosystem needs to really optimize for is liquidity also across different environments.
Obviously, liquidity fragmentation is a challenge.
But I think here also with, you know, RLUSD becoming a more and more usable asset for settlement,
a more and more usable asset for settlement,
we want to make sure that where liquidity sits,
there's going to be basically natural trading pair
emerging with XRP and WXRP, of course.
So I think this is crucial,
and this is why we're all working together,
obviously, very hard to make sure that WXRP and Solana
becomes effectively usable
and a financial instrument that is integrated into
different applications across the Solana ecosystem as soon as possible.
Nice. Thank you so much, Georgia. Vibu, as liquidity improves across these cross-chain
assets like XRP, but also I think the blockchain ecosystem
should converge to a number of different systems
that you can kind of move in and out of very quickly.
Like there's a number of different technologies, right?
There's anything from Near Intense,
which is a pretty awesome technology,
across to Axlar, Wormhole, Overbridge, Optionality.
What do you think that changes for the developer experience?
Do you think we're going to see more kind of multi-chain applications? I know that's obviously
probably against the ethos of what you guys are trying to do in terms of strategy. You probably
want to win a take all, but do you think the world kind of moves towards like a more multi-chain
developer experience across like a variety of different applications.
I'd love to hear your take on that.
Yeah, I mean, I think definitely people are going to, it's going to be easier to build
multi-chain.
One of the things that's happening with AI right now, you can't go five minutes without
mentioning cloud code, but it does make make, in general, does make translating
in any application to another ecosystem pretty trivial. And so I do expect to see, you know,
folks, you know, digging in, replatforming in different ways. But the way I interpret your
question, which is maybe a little different, is there are, you know, there's going to be
the HexTrust version of XRP in the network, but you might there are, you know, there's going to be the Hex Trusts version of XRP
on the network, but you might see another, you know, two, three, four, five. You know, in the
case of Bitcoin, we have, I think, like 27 strains of Wrapped BTC on Solana that are available,
some of which have, like, tremendous liquidity and some of which have very little. And so I think what I'm excited about
is kind of improving the DevEx experience
around wrapped assets in general.
Actually, Stephen, our engineer,
I can see him listening here.
He's working on this right now.
Like if you were building on any chain,
how do you know which assets to trust?
Which ones have the most liquidity?
Which ones have passed the right audits and have the right security in which ones have passed, you know, the right
audits and have the right security in place.
I think there's like still kind of some open questions about how to actually make it work
for developers in a universe where, you know, like I think what bridges add to crypto is
trust.
And, you know, doing that in a, you know, trustless environment is just. And, you know, doing that in a, in a, you know, trustless
environment is just an interesting, you know, spot to build. But yeah, I don't know if that
answers your question, but yeah. No, no, yeah, thanks. I think I pivoted from our questions. So
put you on the spot there in a different way. But I think that's super informative, especially
about how you're kind of identifying which assets you can trust. Obviously, it gets challenging
when there's a number of different issued assets, a number of different issuers, and
they all have different trust profiles. And I think that especially becomes more important
as institutions come into the ecosystem and really want to know where they can put their
money.
Wrapped assets generally have another counterparty risk. And I think that's important, like George has said, to have a trusted institutional party that's issuing them.
George, we're also seeing increased interest on how XRP can interact with RLUSD across
different trading and liquidity environments. How does cross-chain availability help enable the kind of liquidity pairings and institutional
use cases against XRP and RLUSD?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So I guess we all sit in this industry where we need to deal with multiple chains, right?
And as Vibu said, we need to deal with multiple assets that can mean
the same fundamentally in different chains, issued by different counterparties. It's a very, very,
let's just call it what it is. It's a questionable user experience, right? Especially for institutions
that realistically, they don't really want to deal with it,
with not the fragmentation, but the fact that assets can exist
and reside in different places.
So for example, cross-chain availability basically means that you could have,
I don't know, WXRP in one chain and you want to use that as collateral i don't know to
borrow rluz in a different chain right so from a from a i will say an institutional perspective
but in general i think users just want to be able to safely access um the services and products
whether it's trading whether it's um you know yield, where they get the best quality and safety for that specific
product. So this should really ultimately be fully abstracted away from where that asset sits.
But again, I think we're really far, obviously, from this optimal user experience. However,
cross-chain availability and interoperability as the
infrastructure piece of it is really the foundational layer that will enable one day
this optimized user experience. So that piece is fundamental. It's fundamental to
basically enable access and capital efficiency. does cross-chain availability guarantee liquidity
not necessarily but it does remove remove friction and in markets reducing friction is really just
already a first step even just to enable liquidity to naturally deepen by itself
yeah so i think yeah this is my main point of view on this
thank you and i yeah i think you guys are obviously playing a crucial part to how we're
seeing this happen with xlp and solana but i i imagine you will continue to play a kind of
crucial part into many ecosystems so i think it would be great if we continue to kind of talk about
what you're seeing in the market,
how this unlocks new opportunities across different chains,
and essentially everyone can learn from each other
around this issuance.
And this is not the type of thing that you would see,
say, the big cloud providers do,
like an AWS, a GCP, a Microsoft.
That type of kind of friendly cooperation
is not necessarily as common in traditional technology industries.
So I think it's a great opportunity to work with one Solana and learn from what they're doing,
but also Hextrust as a custodian across multiple chains and really take lessons from that.
Vibu, looking ahead as more assets become interoperable across ecosystems, what do you see as the biggest opportunity for collaboration
between Solana and the XRP Ledger?
Yeah, we've been, you know, for the last couple of months,
I mean, honestly, we've been waiting for the launch
to kind of unveil more of what we're planning to do.
Like, we want to be the best place to trade and use ReptXRP. And so we've been, you know, kind of like looking up and down
the application layer, especially I would say like XRP, the XRPL has like a really awesome and unique set of entrepreneurs who are building.
And we are looking for ways to be able to add utility or add use cases
in places where it might make sense.
Imagine an XRPEL-based self-custody wallet
having access to that communal lending market
where they can earn. I know a lot of the developers, there's like a bunch of solutions
for this already. Like, I don't know if I should mention my name, but, you know, certainly like
I've been paying attention. We think Solana is a really good option in the mix for devs who
want to add a revenue source or add a way for their users to earn or just kind of extend
what they can do with the extra key that they already have within their customers' balances.
Fantastic thing, CB. And so I guess to both of you, kind of taking it in turns, maybe Georgia first, if we look kind of 12 to 18 months, what will signal that the cross-chain XRP usage is truly gaining traction?
be watching most closely and then I think the main question is like how will you guys
see or measure this this project as a success um and and and Georgia first if that's okay
yeah of course now this is the most important thing right first of all I want to I want to say
how really excited we are to launch it soon on Solana I I think measuring success will mean obviously sustained activity and capital
commitment. So we don't want to see spikes of volume. We want to see meaningful signal and
sustained liquidity depth. We want to see listings of WXRP on not only the top venue, but also really for WXRP,
especially on Solana being such a thriving DeFi ecosystem. We want really builders to be excited
as well. So we hope to see also in terms of, you know, a measurable, you know, numeric units to of new products that
leverage WXRP. I think trading obviously is very important, but, you know, financial services is
not just about trading. So having WXRP integrated in different financial workflows across the ecosystem. That's another, let's call it KPI, that we want to see.
And yeah, and I think, yeah, obviously liquidity, volume,
all of it, you know, sustained, meaningful, deep,
and then integration into financial products beyond trading.
I think these are the indicators we're looking for.
Yeah.
Awesome, thank you.
And VB?
Yeah, I can tell on that.
I mean, I think those are a really good set of goals.
I'm thinking a lot about the application layer as well.
Like we recently launched tokenized prediction markets
and DFLOW yesterday announced that they had,
this launch is December and they have 200 applications
that are already integrating these new tokens.
I think we'd love to be able to say something similar here.
Like if we woke up in the summer
and there were a couple hundred new applications
that were putting XRP to use,
that would be pretty awesome.
Obviously, the basics for us are REV network revenue,
the contribution from trading and things like that.
But yeah, the most important thing, in my opinion,
is just creative ways to use XRP
that are not maybe possible in other places.
that are not maybe possible in other places.
Fantastic.
Thank you so much, both of you guys.
I'll probably start to hand over to the next session,
and I really appreciate you joining us today.
I know, as I said, the time zones are pretty different
for all of the people on this call,
so thank you for coming to share with the XRP community.
The next session that we have is the APAC XRP Innovation Spotlight.
I'll hand over to the team over there now.
I think we've got, I can see a couple of people on.
Good luck for the session.
My favorite brother, Phil, is here.
Don't tell Dom and Tat.
So I guess I'll pass it over to your team.
Cheers.
Cheers, Luke.
GM, everybody.
Handing it off from Luke.
This is Tat speaking from Ripple.
I'm the Senior Ecosystem Growth Manager based in Singapore.
And this is the APAC XRP Innovation Spotlight.
So good to see so many familiar faces here.
Very excited.
I'll give a quick intro about what this next hour is going to be about
and also do a quick intro about the speakers and lineup of what's to come.
So for the APAC XRP Innovation Spotlight,
it's about community-driven session designed to showcase
how projects across the XRP ecosystem are expanding
real XRP utility. The session will open with featured projects sharing how they're building
with XRP and the initiatives they're leading right now. So we can also probably hear about
what's new on their roadmaps as well. The session then opens to an additional ecosystem projects
that are in the space right now, and we'll call some projects up to share what they're working on.
And we'll also have some balanced participation across moderators,
projects, and company handles that you see here right now.
So for today's lineup, first half is going to be three big spotlights.
We have Nancy Beaton from Uphold, Phil and Dom from EZA,
and Rox from Doppler.
And it will be co-moderated between myself,
Danella CryptoQueen, and Moonchaser. So I'll go ahead and hand off to the first moderator to
introduce our first spotlight, Danella CryptoQueen. Thanks, Tats. I am here loud and clear here.
Thanks, Tats. I am here loud and clear here. Thank you for the intro. So I am Danella Crypt Uphold is a global crypto and digital asset platform
that lets users buy, sell and hold, transfer XRP and many other digital assets. It's a platform
supports native XRP deposits and withdrawals, digital wallets and broader multi-asset trading
that connects mainstream users to the XRP ecosystem. So Nancy Beaton is the US
president at Uphold, the global multi-asset platform, with a deep experience across financial
services, fintech and regulatory strategy. She leads Uphold's US growth and compliance efforts
in a rapidly growing and evolving market. Under her leadership, Uphold continues to strengthen access to XRP
and XRPL-based assets, bridging traditional finance
with real-world blockchain utility.
So welcome up, Nancy.
How are you doing?
Hey, I'm doing well.
That was a long intro.
You're welcome.
So, Nancy, I thought we might touch on XRP adoption and Uphold's role.
So, Uphold has been supporting XRP on its platform for years. How do you see the role
of exchanges like Uphold in deepening XRP adoption and utility globally?
Uphold in deepening XRP adoption and utility globally? Yeah, you know, I think trading venues
like Uphold, which are global, have a lot of things they offer to their users. But as I was
prepping for this and thinking about our most important role, you know, I think it's really about helping our users make their digital assets
work harder for them. So sometimes that's access, right, to tokens, to projects, to things that they
want to have in their investment portfolio. Sometimes it is daily utility, right, where a node
on the enterprise side for Ripple payments when
enterprises want to be able to send funds intercompany or, you know, across the globe.
So, you know, the utility piece of it. And I think really important, especially right now,
is trying to help users maximize the value of their assets. And sometimes that's with rewards, right? You spend on your
debit card, you get 4% XRP back. You put some of your direct deposit paycheck in the US into your
account, you get 4% XRP back. You put fiat on our platform, you get 3.7% back, better than any bank
around my area. And then, you know,
just the earnings and being able to maximize the value of that. So, you know, I think everybody
long knows that Uphold and the XRP community have a long history. We never delisted XRP in the US
and continue to support the community. And I think really our role is to make sure that the community
and its users have access to all the things that will help them
maximize their holdings, their assets, their rewards,
both on the enterprise and the institutional side.
Yeah, great.
Such a well-rounded answer.
So with my next question for you, Nancy, is with the
rising interest of XRP on native assets like ROUSD and tokenized products,
how is Uphold thinking about liquidity and access?
Yeah, so a lot of the liquidity, a lot of the access, a lot of the rewards, the benefits
that are available through great projects, which we can hit some that we're working with,
is really in the DeFi space.
And I think there's a lot of great work happening there that our role is to make it easy for
our users to access that.
You know, a lot of us that have been in crypto a long time
know that sometimes when you go into the DeFi space,
it may be not always as user-friendly, always as easy.
It might need regular monitoring, pairing.
You know, it needs, it doesn't quite have the friendly UX yet that some of the, you know, more centralized
offerings do. So when we look at projects, we love the things that they can bring, right? We love that
they can bring on-chain rewards. We love that they can bring on-chain yield. We love the lending and
borrowing. You know, we're just in the testing phase now that we
launched a credit card where you can use your XRP to instantly borrow against your XRP without
selling its assets. So you can unlock the value of your XRP, hold your XRP, and then spend it in
your daily life on a credit card. Our role in that really is to take
what's happening in the DeFi space and, you know, on the, you know, natively on XRPL to our customers
in a way that they can quickly and easily access that. Because all the rewards we've been giving,
all the unlocking of the lending and borrowing we want to do. We want that to be on chain and we can
do that with partners, right? We're working with Firelight, we're working with Flare,
looking at yield and rewards. We're looking at working with Morpho and earning rewards on RLUSD.
So these are all partners and projects that we want to bring to our users. And I think our role is to make sure that it's an easy, safe, transparent way for our users to participate.
Absolutely. I agree with you 100%, Nancy.
So that's a great segue for my next question.
Because as users look for seamless bridges between trading, self-custody and active XRPL use, what innovations like is Uphold pursuing?
And then I have a follow up question for you only because you talked about UX and how important UX is.
UX seems. Yeah. So starting with the first one, I would say, you know, the innovations we're
looking at is how to bring our users the ability to unlock the value of their assets without
liquidating assets, right? So how can you borrow on your assets and roll the interest forward, right? Have interest-only payments where you still keep the core value of your assets.
So, you know, we really love things like lending and borrowing on-chain, being able to provide
some sort of yield or reward on-chain.
Those things help our users who, you know, let's face it, everybody in this community is a zealot about the opportunities that XRP is going to bring forth, and they are holding and stacking these assets.
value of that and the utility of that through some of these things. So, you know, sometimes we,
you know, give out the rewards, sometimes we fund the rewards, sometimes we have a way to deliver
on rewards. But I think the most exciting thing for us is working with native XRPL so that a lot
of these rewards can be delivered on chain to our users. So I think that's the key for us as we move forward. Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much,
Nancy. And I guess, you know, for me, the importance of UX simplification for onboarding
mainstream users to XRPL activity. Your thoughts? Yeah, I think it's really, really important. You
know, I can tell you, we just went through it again today.
And there's a lot of things that users will be able to do.
I think the key is making them understand the value of doing that.
So, you know, the idea that you could unlock and borrow against the value of your assets without selling your assets,
that resonates to holders of XRP and other assets. The idea that you would have collateralized
loans with fixed interest rates and premiums with regular payments, that does not resonate.
So I think it's really important for us to be more market-led,
to be customer-led. And when we're thinking about how to talk to them, to put the copy in,
to put the UX in, it has to be really simple because these folks have a lot of their financial assets tied up in crypto and XRP. So it is precious to them.
And we need to treat it like that. And we need to make it so transparent and clear to them
so that they understand what they're doing with those valuable assets. So I couldn't agree more
with you. I think the way we talk about it, the way we present it, the UX around it, I think is so key. And I think
if Uphold works with our partners like Flare and Firelight, I think we can make sure that
our users understand it and can adopt it. Thank you so much, Nancy.
Yeah, happy to. Such a great time with you up here today. Really appreciate you jumping on for the APAC region.
And I'm going to hand back to Tats now. Thank you, Crypto Queen. And thank you, Nancy.
We can go ahead and move right over to Hong Kong, I believe. And also,
moderating this next panel will be Moon Chaser. so I'll give it off to Moon Chaser.
Thank you, Tats, and hi, everyone, and welcome to the EZ-A segment.
My name is Tai Fung, also known as Moon Chaser on X, and I'm a co-founder of Onami Press
and a longtime avid member of the XRP community.
Today, we're joined by the passionate brothers behind EZ-A,
Phil Kwok, CEO and co-founder of EZ-A,
and Dom Kwok, COO and co-founder of EZ-A.
EZ-A began as a widely used web-free learning platform,
educating developers around the world
on blockchain technologies,
including the XRPL and its EVM programmability. learning platform, educating developers around the world on blockchain technologies, including
the XRPL and its EVM programmability.
More recently, the team launched Easy A Labs, moving beyond education to actively building
XRPL native tooling such as wallets and DeFi products.
This marks an important shift from learning to building real-world
applications within the broader XRPL ecosystem. So welcome Phil and Dom. With that context,
let's dive in.
Thanks, Moonshacer. It's great to be here with everyone.
Thank you for having us on the show and thanks to everybody for hosting. Thanks to Ripple and thank you as well for hosting.
Awesome.
So ECA has a massive global developer community.
How has that education experience translated into real world,
well, real builder activity on the XRPL?
That's a great question.
And we, of course, are very,
very excited to be ushering in a new wave renaissance of developers into the XRP ledger.
When we first got started working with Ripple, actually, I'll take people back to the origin story, because I think that brings a lot of color to this.
And I don't think we've actually shared this before publicly, but it all actually started a couple of years ago when we were hosting a hackathon.
And one of the Ripplers actually came by and messaged us and said, look, heard about this cool hackathon that you are hosting.
Can I drop by?
We said, of course, by all means.
He saw the energy of all the builders that we had in the room.
If anybody has seen a hackathon, an easy hackathon online, you'll know that we have hundreds and hundreds of the smartest people.
Actually, we're out here in Hong Kong right now,
and we have a whole conference center filled pretty much
with hackers building.
We have some of the smartest people in web3,
the smartest people in Asia as well, who have come to build.
And that's where it all got started.
The Ripple said, you know what?
We need some more of this energy.
We need more builds on the XRP ledger.
We got chatting.
And that is where we originally started working together.
And of course, over the years,
we've hosted a number of hackathons together with Ripple.
And we have been able to bring some really,
really cool projects to the fore.
So in terms of builders,
you can have a look at some of the hackathons
that we've done together with Ripple and see these different applications that they are building.
So one of the ones that I love to look at is Xenopay, and that is one of the ones built,
well, they built it actually at, well, in particular, they launched it at the Hong Kong hackathon last year.
They were continuing to build it at Singapore, so Apex last year as well.
And this allows people to pay using RLUSD on the XRP ledger.
It's really one of those real use cases that people are able to see.
And if you have a look at some of the other projects as well from the hackathons, of course, we'll be sharing more
as we bring more and more builders to the space
over the next coming months.
I think we're in this phase right now,
and obviously we'll touch on this in a couple of moments
with what we're doing with EZA Labs.
We're at this moment right now
where we've got all the best primitives,
all the primitives that we need really on the XRP ledger.
And for the ones that are still, that we still need, they're pretty much coming, right?
We have the lending protocol coming to the XRP ledger.
We have that amendment coming soon.
And of course, that is where we're then going to have other players.
Like we were just up on stage with Sagar, our chief business officer, Evan North yesterday, at Consensus, where they will be deploying capital into the field.
So I think we're at this amazing stage right now where we have the builders who are coming.
We're bringing the builders.
We have the primitives there or pretty much there on the ledger.
And we also, of course, have these other assets like RLUSD, like some of the tokenization efforts that we've been hearing about as well. And so that is what we are doing in order to bring more builders and really make
sure that this ecosystem, this funnel missing piece gets built out. Yeah, and I'll just add to
that. Go ahead, Dom, please. Yes. I'll just add to that as well. I think everyone here knows how
active we are on socials in terms of posting exactly where we are, what we're doing.
And yeah, if you're following along this yesterday and today,
definitely see what's going on in Hong Kong,
because there is some really cool stuff getting built on the XRPL,
just in the whole ecosystem, really.
And they're the guys and girls who are building the future of crypto. And it's really cool, I think, for everyone who's watching at home to just see sort of what's happening in real life,
and really sort of see that innovation happen firsthand. Today, we have Demo Day,
we're going to be posting about that. So we're going to showcase some of the projects
that actually get built on stage. So definitely would recommend everyone keeping a close eye on
that, because ultimately, it's the people who build the crypto space, who build the DeFi infrastructure.
All of these projects are actually built by real humans, of course, a little bit of AI these days, too.
But ultimately, these are the people who are building the future and we bring them together.
So I think it's always a really cool thing to be watching from at home.
Well, that's awesome. Thank you, Phil, for that origin story.
That was really cool to learn about.
Now, that's great perspective on education,
on how education turns into action.
So let's move from builders to products.
EZA Labs is building practical XRPL apps
like mobile wallets and lending tools.
What real world problems are you solving with these products?
Great question.
This really dovetails well from, I think, Dom's last point
where he was talking about really being in touch with the community.
And I think we see everybody in the XRP army on here every single day,
pretty much.
Shout out to all of our amazing gigabrains whoRP army on here every single day, pretty much. Shout out to all of our amazing GigaBrain's who are out on here,
all the XRP army as well.
You help to drive this ecosystem forward.
And one of the things that we've consistently heard about from users is,
well, I see all this stuff going on.
I want to be able to tap into on-chain.
I want to be able to do more stuff on-chain,
but I'm just not certain about how to do that.
There's all of these things that happen in Web3 that you hear about.
You hear about these hacks.
You hear about people losing their keys.
Obviously, fortunately, on the XRP Ledger,
we don't have smart contracts in the traditional sense of them.
These take place via these primitives and the amendments that come through,
which are really baked in and are, of course, a course a lot safer but still people can lose their keys um people sometimes
will have cold bullets but accidentally upload their private key into their hot wallet or they
might even just keep it in the hot wallet or just keep it on exchange and um these sorts of things
of course every cycle we have more and more uh casualties of just the UX that we have in crypto, which, to be frank, is quite confusing to the normal person who isn't doing Web3 full time.
And even for people who do it full time, it can be a real minefield.
So it's twofold. It is, number one, actually making crypto easier to use.
And that's what we really pioneered over at EZA and at the EZA Lab.
So with one app of the day, we have become the best user experience for onboarding people into Web3.
And we are taking that in order to actually solve that problem that people tell us about every single day within the XRP community and also beyond.
the xrp community and also beyond which is we want a really good product that allows us to use
web3 just like we would any other app and so that's what we're building and that's in terms
of to answer your question about the real world aspect that's what we're trying to solve for and
that's why uh when we made that announcement about easy labs we talked about the wallet side we talked
about of course the lending the borrowing which people We talked about, of course, the lending, the borrowing,
which people use a lot of products
for at the moment. And of course, there's a
whole host of other applications that
we're going to be building as well. But really with a focus
on making
this ledger
accessible to normal people to
integrate into their real lives.
Awesome.
Dom, would you like to add anything to that?
I think Phil summed it up pretty well.
Awesome.
Okay.
Now, clearly, there's a strong focus on usability and real adoption.
So that leads nicely into my next question.
How do you see EZ-A Labs bridging the gap between understanding XRPL features and actually building on them?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when we started EZ-A, the goal was really to educate people on different blockchains from XRP Ledger to Solana to Aptos to Sui and beyond.
Over the last couple of years, we've really refined the blockchains that we focus on.
And of course, the XRP Ledger is one of those ones that we've been particularly excited about. And as
anyone who's been following us knows, we've become extremely bullish as well on the whole XRP
ecosystem, from developers to retail holders to the whole community in general. And, you know,
Ripple have become a super close partner of ours as well through the education
side and now labs. I think from our perspective educating people is just the first step. Everyone
who is here on this space clearly is into crypto is very excited about the prospects of what crypto
and blockchain can do in terms of institutional finance and even retail finance. But ultimately, for us, taking that the next step and sort of really expanding EZA is where EZA Labs come in.
Of course, educating people on crypto is one thing.
Showing them why it's important is super important, of course, for the growth of the ecosystem and bringing tons of people in.
But ultimately, we also now are going to be building products that people can actually use.
And there's no better way to bring people into crypto and into blockchain than by building practical apps, practical products that the everyday person can actually use.
So for us, that's a really logical next step and the next evolution of EZA.
Of course, we're going to continue educating people, more and more people than ever.
We're going to continue expanding EZA app.
We're going to be continuing to expand the hackathons we do
and the scale to bring many, many more people into crypto
on the education side, because as we all know,
only 7% of the world currently are into crypto and hold crypto.
So there's a huge space to grow,
which is obviously hugely bullish, of course,
for companies like Ripple and other major blockchain companies.
But ultimately, we're going to be building products, like Phil said, that are seamless for the everyday user to use.
Products that actually allow people to tap into the power of blockchain and crypto without necessarily even knowing that there are crypto rails.
that there are crypto rails.
And I think that's the real key
And I think that's the real key for the next evolution of crypto.
for the next evolution of crypto.
Everyone here knows how hard it can be
to transfer your crypto from one person to another.
Everyone knows how tedious it can be
to type in wallet addresses,
how tedious it can be to access your wallet
in the first place.
And for us, being able to create an experience
that allows people to actually transfer funds seamlessly
is really going to
bring crypto to the masses and really spur that mass adoption. So very similar to how EZA really
revolutionized the crypto learning process by making it easy for anyone to learn about the
world's best blockchains from their phone for free in a couple of clicks. We're going to be doing the
same for the regular retail user in terms of allowing them to tap into the power of crypto
in a few clicks right from their phone so this is a very logical next step for us
and we're very excited for everyone start using the first things that we launch
it really is so exciting i'm just even dumb just saying that's getting me giddy with excitement we
have even more that we'll be able to share within the next couple of months. We're working towards something very, very big, which we'll be able to share with everyone soon.
And that should be ready end of this month.
And hopefully we'll be able to announce either then, if not very, very beginning of March.
And obviously, really looking forward to seeing everybody who is here at ConsenSys in Hong Kong, who's coming very, very soon. So if anybody is not following us,
you can just drop us a follow
and we will be able to find out more
about what we're building as we really are able
to make those public announcements
over the next couple of weeks.
Well, thank you very much, Dom and Phil,
and thank you for sharing those insights.
Before we wrap up,
is there anything else you'd like to add to this segment? I think really that the biggest thing that I think people should know is that we're really,
there is so much more growth ahead of us than there is behind us. I think it's easy sometimes,
I mean, I first got into the space in crypto in 2013. And even a couple of years on 2015,
2017, people were like, Okay, that's the growth phase done. That's you get to 2021 then that's the growth phase done.
Look, we're in 2026 right now.
And most of the growth is still very much ahead of us.
Dom and I would not be in the space.
We wouldn't be working so hard unless we believe that.
And unless we genuinely believe that we could have an impact
and help to grow this industry so much
more so to everybody who is uh here in the space this is what we ourselves are banking on and i
think that we're just going to see so much come out we're you know we're going to be in dc in a
couple of weeks as well of course next on the roadmap is let's get the clarity act passed
and let's bring uh clarity let's bring uh clear regulations to the states let's get the Clarity Act passed and let's bring clarity. Let's bring clear regulations to the states.
Let's make sure that we can all build
with confidence as well.
And I think that that is where
all of our partners as well,
you know, massive hats off to Ripple,
to all the Ripples out there as well,
who have been, you know, supporting this effort.
And of course, to our XRP army out here,
we couldn't do it without you.
So, you know, this is really, really where it all begins.
I think we'll look back on this community day
and see this as being one of those moments
where we all came together and realized,
look, this is where the best days are very much ahead of us.
So thank you everybody for tuning in
and thank you very much for hosting as well.
Yeah, just to add to that.
Yes.
Yeah, just to add to what Phil said,
everything he said, of course, I agree with,
being his co-founder and his brother.
But I think as well, there's so much to be excited about.
I think it's easy when the market's down
to get a bit despondent and think,
maybe this is it.
This has been the big run that everyone's been looking for.
But ultimately, I think, again,
you look at what's happening on the tech slide, look at what all the smart people in the ecosystem are doing, look at what the Ripple team themselves are doing as well.
There's so much to be excited for.
Everyone really is all in.
Phil and I are definitely all in.
We're always on the move, always in a different city every couple of days, all around the world, from the US to Asia to the UK, Europe, etc. And we're really building it,
making it happen. And I think, yeah, I just want to say thank you to everyone for listening.
Thank you to everyone for being on the space. Thank you to everyone as well for being so engaged
every time that we post on Twitter. We appreciate it all. We try and reply to as many people as we
can, even though we're always on the move and in different time zones. But yeah, it means a a lot to us and we're looking forward to meeting everyone in person as well at all the events throughout the
year xrp las vegas and and all the others that we um we host in different cities and um speak
out so yeah thanks everyone for being here especially uh some of the uh super cool people
like top grandpa i see james uh who who else stone does amazing stuff as well Dan
Fisher as well and of course the ripple team and many others who I can't really see yet on the
screen there's so many of you but yeah no thanks everyone and we look forward to meeting as many
of you in person as possible thanks so much Dom and Phil yes Yes, thank you. Thank you for joining us today and we appreciate the work
that both of you are doing to grow the XRPL ecosystem and the larger Web3 space in general.
With that, I'd like to hand over the next segment back to Tats to introduce Doppler Finance.
Thank you everyone. Thank you Moon Chaser and thank you phil and dom uh always a pleasure working with you too
and before i go into introducing doppler finance too i wanted to just take this opportunity to maybe
shed some light on like uh what happens on day to day and me as a ecosystem growth manager uh
one of the biggest things i look for is finding these champion projects in the XRP ecosystem.
And Doppler Finance, for those of you who don't know, I can give you a quick overview,
but Doppler Finance is an XRPL native yield generation and DeFi protocol exploring ways
to let holders earn returns on their assets without selling and turn XRP into productive
financial collateral.
So it's gaining ecosystem traction since 2025,
including strategic alignment with partners like SBI Ripple Asia and Evernorth,
looking at tokenized ways to earn returns on XRP holdings.
So that's the quick overview about Doppler.
But some things that people don't see behind the scenes is,
how do you know some project becomes like a champion project
in an ecosystem and i remember last year when every single day somebody or some vc or some
investor was calling me messaging me or even some rippler in the office was like hey have you heard
of doppler finance hey have you heard of doppler and it got to a point where it was like three
people a day was just messaging me like who's this Doppler have you heard of Doppler we're interested in Doppler so I remember that was the moment where I felt
like okay this is where Doppler hit this moment of oh they're a champion project in the ecosystem
and I still remember in September we went to Korea for XRP Seoul and Doppler was one of the title
sponsors alongside Ripple and just seeing 3,000 plus people in the room and Doppler presenting as well was a super inspirational moment.
So just wanted to share like a behind the scenes personal moment last year where Doppler was gaining a lot of traction.
So very excited to bring up Rox, the co-founder of Doppler, to talk a little bit more about Doppler and introduce about Doppler.
Rox, if you're there, if you can do a quick intro of yourself.
Sure thing. Hey everyone, hey Todd. I'm Rox, one of the co-founders and head of institutions at
Doppler Finance. And I think you did a really, really great intro. So just to shed more lights, for those who might not be familiar with us, Doppler Finance
is the leading institutional-grade yield infrastructure for XRP and ROUSD built natively on the XRP ledger.
And as Todd mentioned, we solve a critical gap in the ecosystem, basically transforming XRP from a passive non-staking
asset into a productive financial asset.
And historically, XRP holders haven't had a way to earn yield without selling.
So we provide a secure environment where you can earn transparent risk-adjusted returns
while keeping your exposure to XRP.
And basically, our goal is to bridge the gap.
So we take these institutional grid yield opportunities,
which used to be exclusive to big institutions,
and also leverage the native features of XRP Ledger
to open them up to retail XRP holders.
And I believe this is exactly why major players from, you know, institutional giants
like SBI RippleAsia, Evernorth, to top tier exchanges like Bybit and BitGet are all partnering
with Doppler to unlock XRP's potential. Thanks for that intro, Rox. I think everyone's curious to know,
like, how does Doppler work today? And what use cases are you seeing real users interact with?
Would you be able to share some details on that? How does Doppler work today and what use cases are you seeing real users interact with?
Would you be able to share some details on that?
All right, that's a great question. So that's precisely our core mission.
So as we all know, XRP is fundamentally a non-staking asset.
And unlike other ecosystems where native yield is standard, XRP holders have faced a binary choice, simply hold or sell.
But Doppler changes that paradigm that I mentioned above.
And specifically, we utilize a CD5 model powered by strictly vetted delta neutral strategies, similar to how Athena runs their strategies.
So this allows us to generate real yield regardless of whether the
XRP price goes up or down. And from a user's perspective, I would say this removes any kind
of complexity. So you don't have to be able to access returns or yields. You simply deposit and
our institutional infrastructure handles all the execution behind the back. And actually, we are seeing broad adoption from long-term retail holders
to institutions, funds, exchanges,
using Doppler to finally transform the idle XRP into a more productive asset.
I think that segues into my next question quite well,
where we've seen these recent collaboration signals with partners that are institutions like SBI, Evernorth.
And like, what does this mean for Doppler's growth and institutional interest in XRPL DeFi?
Recent collaboration and news with institutions like SBI Ripple Asia, Evernorth shows that interest on XRPFI is growing not only on the retail sector side, but also on the institutional side.
And I believe these kind of collaborations are crucial because in the crypto industry, trust is the ultimate currency.
is the ultimate currency. So as a major financial institution in Japan that prioritizes compliance
safety above everything else, SBI support or collaboration validates that Doppler is building
compliant infrastructure that meets their strict standards. And I believe that level of trust is
exactly what led to the massive news we just shared yesterday, our strategic partnership with
Bybit. So for those who haven't seen the news yet, Doppler will be powering the XRP earned products
on Bybit. And this kind of partnership means that we will be delivering institutional grade yield
directly to millions of users on a global scale, including institutions and retails. And I believe that in the end, it proves that Doppler is becoming the standard for XRP
yield.
Wow.
Congrats on that news.
That's massive.
Yeah.
So I'd say like DeFi activity on XRP is evolving, right?
And we want to see like what challenges remain for like protocols like Doppler
and what milestones should the ecosystem watch for in 2026?
So for Doppler, our remote 2026 is straightforward.
It's more accessibility for the retails and institutions.
So we'll be introducing more and more features
throughout this year.
For example, our RLUSD vault yield went live a couple days ago. And following our news with
Bybit, we believe every XRP wallet, every exchange, every staking platform should have a earn button
powered by Doppler. And we're already in deep talks with other major players,
like wallets you probably use every day,
or exchanges you probably use every day,
to embed our infrastructure directly onto their platforms.
So I would say that our goal is by the end of 2026,
earning on XRP should be for everyone,
from XRP holders to institutions.
And we are building this standard yield layer for the entire ecosystem so that your assets, XRP or USD, are always working for you safely and transparently.
This might be a curveball question, but would you like to share some of the context story of the evolution of Doppler and the context behind how it's come to become?
I think those are behind-the-scenes stories that might have not been shared widely in the past as well.
All right.
So I think it goes back to when we first launched our product early last year.
And we introduced this kind
of new CD5 model or yield for XRP and it was quite a new concept for a lot of the users
and I think it took time to make users understand how it works to show that we can provide stable
yields throughout the whole year and I think these kind of collaborations and partnerships were really crucial
throughout that process
because the more and more trust we build,
the more and more trust that can add on to those trusts.
And as institutions also are coming in,
I think the retail sites are more comfortable
with using Doppler and getting yields on XRP.
And I think it all goes together hand in hand.
Like there are definitely interests and idle XRP out there. People want to earn on it, utilize it.
And it's just a matter of time and how we scale up with all these partnerships and new features
coming out. And in the end, we just want to be the core provider,
you'll provide infrastructure provider for these retails
and institutions throughout the XRP ecosystem.
Awesome.
I guess my last question would be,
I think you already made a big announcement,
but is there anything else you'd like to mention
that we didn't get to cover?
I would say we do have more major announcements coming up.
And I can't share much details at the moment. I would say we do have more major announcements coming up.
I can't share much details at the moment,
but in the end, we do want to add in more features,
for example, like the landing protocol,
and many more.
So just stay tuned,
and we'll be announcing our updates on Rx.
Thank you. Thank you, Rox.
I appreciate you and your team as well.
I always find it's,
I don't have to keep tabs or like keep in check with Doppler
because people will come to me and ask
and update me about Doppler.
So like congrats on the growth
and looking forward to the 2026 roadmap
and new announcements coming as well.
And yeah, that concludes the Doppler session.
Appreciate your time, everybody.
We're going to transition into startup and project highlights.
I see a few here.
So we're going to bring a few of these projects in our ecosystem up to share about what they
So I see XRPL Japan, Axiom, Assetto, Control. Are you able to request speaker? Okay, I see XRPL
Japan. I believe this is Mai. Is it Mai? Hi everyone. Yeah, this is Mai. Hey, nice to see you.
Hi Mai. How are you doing? Hi, I'm doing very good. Well, thank you for having me.
Is it okay for me to start or should I wait?
Yeah, I want to make sure we get enough time for everyone.
So like roughly two, three minutes, quick intro, quick pitch of what you're doing
and any announcements that you'd like to make to the group would be awesome.
Okay.
I'll give it to you.
Okay, let me just go quickly.
Hi, everyone. Thank you. Okay. Let me just go quickly. Hi, everyone.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm my director of XRP of Japan.
I also work for XRP Labs, Zaman, and supporting users in the community.
I'm really happy to see Tats here who's been supporting us tremendously.
And of course, Kuta Queen and Moon Chaser, my dear dear friends.
So thank you. Before I jump into XRP Tokyo, just a quick word about us.
So XRP of Japan is a community-driven organization focused on growing the XRP ecosystem in Japan.
We support developers and help onboard new builders and empower creators across the space.
Okay, sorry, I know, I only have a few minutes. So now, XRP Tokyo 2026.
This will be the largest XRP-focused event ever held in Japan. We're hosting it alongside the
Teams AI slash Black Blockchain Summit, one of the biggest conferences in the region.
So the scale and energy are going to be fire.
We're expecting around 2,000 attendees, primarily XRP holders and people interested in the ecosystem.
We're very excited that Ripple is joining as a title sponsor.
And we're currently in discussions with major players across the XFIA ecosystem and the broader blockchain industry.
And I'd like to note that what makes this especially meaningful is the global support behind it. Communities such as Wave of Innovation from Australia.
The one like Daniella is also leading.
And I'm going to be also attending XRP Australia
happening on February 27th.
And I'm very excited about it along with
and also XRP Africa, XRP Canada, XRP Korea, and XRP Malaysia are also joining us for
the XRP Tokyo as community partners.
And yeah, XRP Tokyo is happening on April 7thth and the timing could not be better. Late March to early April
is cherry blossom season in Japan and our venue Hapuen has more than 400 years of history and
features a stunning stunning beautiful traditional Japanese garden. So you're not just attending an XFPE Tokyo, but you're experiencing
Japan at one of the most beautiful times of the year. So if you've ever been thinking
about visiting Japan or even coming back, this might be the perfect opportunity and
perhaps the most XFPE approved reason to do so.
I'd like to also add that we're offering 50% off with the code XAPIJ2026.
Right now it's early word and it's only $30 and the price will go up about $250.
So please book your ticket now.
Yeah.
And if you're building on XRP Ledger,
or whether you're a project developer, or a part of a team,
we would love to invite you to join us as a community partner.
And many amazing projects have already joined,
and even individual community members are coming in as sponsors.
This is going to be a community-powered event.
So for updates, speaker announcements,
and partnership opportunities,
please follow our account.
And we have much more,
more exciting news coming soon.
I hope to see many of you in Tokyo.
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Mai, for that.
I think this is a great excuse right for everybody
to come to tokyo it's yeah spring season it's the best season of the year in japan uh i think
everyone just needs some excuse to go to japan so this this is the perfect one
perfect if anybody wants to get these tickets they just they just go to your XRPL Japan account
and look at the XRP Tokyo.io website, I believe?
Is that the best way to follow up?
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Okay, sounds good.
Maya and her team in Japan are working hard to prepare this,
so sending you all the love and good vibes your way
love and good vibes your way so april will be successful yeah thank you look yeah looking to
so April will be successful.
Yeah, thank you.
see everyone here at the april tokyo in yeah i'm sorry xrp tokyo in april thank you thanks my all
right next up i'm gonna i see contro here uh i know it's a little bit newer accounts and newer
to the xrp ecosystem but to give you context about Contro, so our ecosystem growth
team at Ripple, we host accelerators around
the world to incubate the next
XRP project, and Contro
was a participant of Cohort 7
in Singapore, and they're Malaysia
based, I believe, and we
have the founder, Wesley, I believe, is Wesley?
Is that you? Yes, yes.
Nice to have you, I've seen you from the very beginning.
Thanks for joining us. Welcome. I'll give it off to you to do your thing. is that you yes yes hey nice to have you i've seen you from the very beginning uh yeah thanks
for joining us welcome i'll give it off to you to do your thing all right thanks todd we appreciate
it and hi everyone hi i'm wesley from you know control i'm the founder of control um we actually
one of the project team you know they graduate you know XRP X-Ray, as Todd just mentioned before.
Really, really appreciate to be here and really, you know, appreciate, you know, for XRPL to give us the opportunity to actually build on it and then be on here today, you know.
Well, to be very simple, like, you know, very briefly to introduce like what Quantro does. We're actually building a charge card that lets you, you know, to spend against your digital asset portfolio without selling it, while those assets can continue, you know, working and compounding
at the background.
Our focus is very simple.
So it's more like we focus to turn on-chain value into real-world utilizations, because
in Control, we believe that if digital assets are going to become the real finance, you
know, they need to behave like a real finance.
And in crypto today, you know, most of the time we are still actually forced to sell the asset to assess the liquidity.
And that's the gap that we see in the industry today.
And, you know, we see that the blockchain technology is actually very powerful, but the real world finance experience actually still very early.
And this is the part that we are actually going into it.
And that's the gap between the on-chain value and the real world financial life.
It's exactly where control actually is born.
The charge card actually is just like, you know, the starting point.
You know, our real vision is pretty simple.
The moment that crypto and blockchain become mainstream it's when
people no longer talk about crypto that's our manifesto it's when users don't realize the
financial system is actually running you know underneath lives just like today people don't
think about internet anymore they just use it you know if digital assets going to take it seriously
as a real finance you know that's what we believe they need to seriously as a real finance. You know, that's what we believe. They need to behave like a real finance.
Well, actually, we are opening our access to our beta.
And actually, we really love everyone, you know, like other builders, all the early users,
you know, from this company to be part of it to help us to shape control how it is today.
You know, thank you.
Thank you, Wesley.
Very excited.
So if anyone's interested in this charge card, so my
understanding is we can create a charge card, link it to the Contro app, and then we can start
earning on our XRP and we can also spend on XRP. That's right. That's right. That's right.
So you can actually, you know, it's great for the diamond hands. Awesome. And where can we go to support you
and check this product?
You can go to my X account.
You can follow it.
There would be a pin on it
so you can directly access one there.
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Wesley.
I guess I see Aceto on the call as well.
I believe Aceto,
it will be Jay, the co-founder.
Jay, are you there?
Yeah. Hey, Tadz.
Hey, okay.
So Aceto, let me give you some context, everybody,
is a XRPO grant recipient for last year,
Hong Kong-based RWA tokenization platform.
And yeah, they're doing a lot, actually.
I think in the RWA space,
I'm really excited about working with Assetto. So I'll give it away to you, Jay. Maybe you can introduce yourself
about Assetto and what you guys are building on XRPL.
Of course. Thanks, Tads, for the invitation. So hey, XRP fam, thanks for having me. My name is JJ, co-founder of Assetto.
So what we're building is we're building the yield layer for the stablecoin economy.
We tokenize live regulated strategies, cash management tools, bonds, private credit, private equity, and also arbitrage strategies.
So balances on chain can actually earn and still plug into
DeFi so think of us as the bridge between institutional yields and also everyday wallets
so why why we are really interested in building in the XRPL rail because you know there's hundreds of
billions of stable coins are sitting idle on chain but most of the RWA is low volatility
so we fix that by making yield tokens more programmable and also composable so that they can live in wallets,
settle instantly, and serve as collateral.
And XRPL really provides the best soil for that.
And we're really proud to be part of the family. And yeah, hope to see you guys in the future somewhere in the conference,
maybe in Japan.
Yeah, thank you.
Awesome, Jay.
I just want to give a little more context.
Like RWA is a hot topic, real world asset tokenization.
I know you guys are targeting more
of the institutional side of things,
but in Hong Kong, there hasn't been much XRPL development.
And what was exciting last year was seeing
Assetto present in front of regulators and key stakeholders in the ecosystem in Hong Kong, talking about building on XRPL and tokenizing these funds. And also the biggest edge about a settle in my opinion is the co founders, and the team you guys have where met many projects that are doing r2b tokenizations, but they just don't understand or don't have a clear distribution strategy but aceto i think you guys found an interesting angle and edge i don't know if you
want to share your secret sauce uh but uh super exciting to see recently there's an 18 million
uh tokenized one on xrpl that uh has been distributed is that correct jay, that's correct. Yeah, appreciate the comment. Yeah, so our founding team are,
you know, most of our co-founders are from TradFi background, ex-Morgan Stanley, UBS,
eFound. So that's why we are able to, you know, we can speak the language of the chatify ecosystem. So we know the business well.
That's why we can actually lend the deals and to be linked with the big titles, if you will.
Even we are only one year old.
We started out like last February.
Now it's only one year.
And overall, we've scaled to over 380 mil of TVL already.
And XRPL is a major battleground we see fit
for us in the coming year.
So we are going to build more and do more distribution
and make the assets more accessible
and also liquid in the coming year.
That's amazing. Yeah, a superhero project coming in from
the institutional side and in hong kong where there's a lot of action happening and also excited
to see that aceto has been featured by hong kong government cyberport which is the innovation arm
too so we're representing on all fronts uh and xrp utility use cases and yeah this is a great
institutional use case.
So I'm really looking forward to seeing
what level Assetto takes it to in 2026.
And yeah, thank you.
Yeah, I just also, I know we're running shorter on time.
So before we close it off, I want to also highlight,
I see a wave of innovation here.
So we had XRP out Japan talk about XRP Tokyo
happening in Aprilil 7th
we have is it next week two weeks yeah xrp australia happening in sydney and wave of
innovation and crypto queen danela is also co-host uh is organizing it i believe it's
is it that wave of innovation right now yes correct how are you today good good i mean
it's been a great session i mean it's a great turnout
today love to give you some time to like talk about what you guys are doing i'm really excited
to be i'll be there on the ground so i'll see a lot of you here there but please uh do talk about
xrp australia yeah of course man no thank you very much for the floor. So, yeah, we've got XRP Australia coming up, and we're really excited to be hosting Ripple as a title sponsor.
We've also secured this time around four major exchanges.
We've got OKEx, Coinbase, Gemini, and Independent Reserve as well.
So some really good exchanges on board.
And, yeah, we've got an amazing lineup.
The agenda was just launched a couple of days ago and yeah we're just putting in the final touches for this event
and it's shaping up to be something truly amazing so yeah we're really excited for everyone to come
down I know Tatchi are coming we've got CryptoIri speaking as well a few others here you know Maya
from XRP or Japan will be coming down. And yeah, this thing
just totally blew up.
Better than we expected. This
rode off the back of the XRP
Gold Coast event that we hosted a couple of years ago.
And, you know, the team's been working
really hard in the background to put all this together
and yeah, we're really excited. So
if you want to come down, you
can visit www.
www.waveofinnovation.com forward slash Sydney 2026.
And links are there for the tickets and we'll see you down under.
Thank you, Desk.
So I wanted to ask you, who are you most keen to see down under in XRP Australia in Sydney?
I got to say, it's the Australia fam.
All the ecosystem people from Australia.
Honestly, last year, I wasn't able to go for any XRP events
or community events.
So I think it's important to have that face time
and just seeing everybody, meeting everybody
and spending time together is what I'm most excited about.
So yeah, I don't know what to expect.
Honestly, I'm looking forward to the trip to Sydney.
Looking forward to having you down, Andar.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, this has been an amazing session.
This one hour just flew by very quickly.
So I want to just summarize what we've gone through so much.
We talked with Uphold, EZA, Doppler,
and just want to say thank you
to all the speakers as well.
Thank you to my co-moderators,
Moon Chaser and Danella Crypto Queen.
And I think what's been amazing
about this session is like,
we see the grassroots community
and the growth happening
in the APAC region as well.
And this innovation spotlight
just is only a handful of all the excitingAC region as well. And this innovation spotlight just is only a handful
of all the exciting things that's happening. And there's so much I want to share, but you'll see,
and it'll come to light soon. So we'll have another session in the future to feature what's
coming up more in this region. So very exciting region. We got these big XRP events. So we got
XRP Australia next, February 27th in sydney
tokyo is april 7th and then september around korea blockchain week it will be xrp seoul as
well so there's three massive xrp community-led events happening uh if you're not from apac or
if you are from apac you have to make it out to at least one. I'll try to see you there. And again, thanks so much.
I'm seeing, I'm getting kicked out.
The next speakers are coming in.
So again, thank you everyone so much
for joining this session.
It's been an honor.
It's been a pleasure.
Great to see you all.
And I'll pass it on to the next speakers.
Thank you so much.
This is Matt Kreiser with Masari. I'm joined by Jack McDonald, Senior Vice President of Stablecoins at Ripple, and Lauren Berta, Ripple Stablecoin Product Lead.
And our session is Why Stablecoins and XRP Matter Together. So Jack and Lauren, welcome.
Thank you. Excited to be here.
Thank you. Excited to be here.
Yeah, so to start, I was thinking, you know, there's a lot of noise around stablecoins right now.
Will the Clarity Act pass? Will the Clarity Act not pass?
Can you share a general update on RLUSD just to kick us off here?
Sure. Obviously, a lot in the news right now around Clarity Act, and I don't have a crystal ball,
though it feels like the momentum has shifted more positive than a lot of folks would have thought a couple of weeks ago.
So we're lighting the candles over here and doing what we can to continue to participate in that dialogue.
As it relates to RLUSD, we had a great year last year, exceeded all of our targets and beat our own expectations.
As you know, around Ripple, we're quite ambitious and optimistic about what we're doing and the opportunities
we see for RLUSD. We've just eclipsed $1.5 billion of market cap, which puts us firmly
in the fifth largest regulated U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, which is really the peer group
that we think about. We built this, as you know, for institutions who see value in heavily
regulated and transparent stablecoins. And we think we
fit the bill in terms of how we run the business, in terms of the partners that we keep. BNY is our
custodian, Deloitte, the attestation agent, other banking partners that we use around the world,
the exchanges, market makers. So we're very excited about the traction that we've had on
the regulator front. We continue to enjoy a good relationship with our regulators.
Excited about the OCC charter that's been conditionally approved and all we can do there.
And I would say most timely, super excited today to announce that tomorrow we will be
live on Binance with full XRPL support.
So that's a big a big deal for us.
We're really excited with the uptake
of the major exchanges, obviously,
Binance being the largest exchange in the market
and to be supported on the XRPL,
which is the native chain that we listed RLUSD on
from the start is super exciting for us
and we think is going to send a really loud signal
around the market that RLUSD on the XRPL is here to stay.
So we're excited.
Yeah, Jack, definitely.
Congratulations on passing $1.5 billion minted.
To date, there's a significant amount of that's been on Ethereum.
$1.2 billion on Ethereum versus $350 million on the XRPL.
Congrats on the announcement with Binance.
How do you think about minting on the XRPL. Congrats on the announcement with Binance. How do you think about minting on the XRPL moving forward?
Yeah, well, we think it's a huge opportunity,
which is part of the reason why we chose
to launch day one on that.
Obviously, Ethereum is where a lot of the support
around stable coins has been existing
and the DeFi landscape heavily embedded into the Ethereum
L1. And so we wanted to be there from day one, really just to start to get traction in the zero
to one. That said, there are a number of really powerful initiatives. I think you've heard a
number of them today from some of my colleagues around the good things that are happening
on the XRPL ecosystem and on that
chain and everything that we can do there. Lauren's going to talk about a couple of other
new opportunities on the XRPL, and we think that you'll see more and more activities. So it takes
time to develop a little bit of muscle memory. You know, a year, year and a half ago, frankly,
there was not a lot of stablecoin activity on the XRPL.
Today, very different, and I think you're going to see meaningful adoption continue to increase there.
And we can also point to a number of recent use cases that we've seen and things like Binance supporting RL-USD on the XRPL,
Binance supporting RLUSDN, the XRPL, as well as a lot of the other major exchanges we're working with, we think is paving the road for future adoption and utility.
I will add from a utility standpoint, Ripple, for those of you who know, and I know we've got a lot of Ripple supporters out there,
everything we do is really built with a target of serving institutions and building infrastructure for them, but
also building for utility.
We're building for the long haul.
And we were very pleased with the decrypt study that was released late in Q4 that measured
the utility of stablecoins.
And we ranked a solid number two behind USDT, well ahead of USDC.
And I think that speaks volumes to the utility that we see in RLUSD adoption,
the sort of use cases that we've been targeting. We're going to talk, I'm sure, later about some
of those use cases in the payments and capital markets world, and those are very strategically
tied to doing more on the XRP ledger, which, as you know, was built from day one for payments
and for settlements. And so I'd say we're just getting started in terms of what the art of the possible is on that chain.
Yeah, absolutely.
Lauren, we'd love to have you jump in on those use cases, exciting updates.
Yeah, for sure.
So we have been doing a lot on the RLUSD side to ensure we are following the XRP community, following XRP demand, and ensuring we are meeting that demand where it is today.
You know, we have always believed in a multi-chain world.
I actually Googled that recently and found a quote from Brad from 2017 talking about how the world will be
multi-chain. Here we are today, obviously right. And there's a lot of reasons for that. The XRPL
developer toolkit is very strong. It's a strong community of builders and innovators,
but sometimes developers are picky and there's other developer toolkits that they
want to use. I think that was definitely a part of the decision to issue on both the XRPL and
Ethereum from early on. I think it's important that we continue allowing those developers who want to use, you know, the different types of tooling to build on XRP.
So we will be going live with RLUSD on the XRPL EVM sidechain very soon.
We've been testing over the last couple of weeks.
I've had our super easy experience building on the chain.
And Pearsyst has done a great job on that work.
So you should see RLUSD coming live there very soon. and Pearsyst has done a great job on that work.
So you should see RLUSD coming live there very soon.
That's great, very exciting. Lot of utility there for those of you who don't know.
Ripple XRPL is in a process of rolling out smart contracts
and on the native chain and in the meantime, XRPL AVM gives that programmability for developers to fully explore, develop, release applications.
Now, Lauren and Jack, I want to talk about RLUSD and the XRP. How are they complementary? How do you think about that?
I'll take it first, Kevin. Maybe, Lauren, you can go a little bit more technical on it.
But if you go back over the last decade,
part of the origin story of how Ripple got into the stablecoin
business was, frankly, increasingly using XRP
as a bridge asset in the payments business,
the cross-border payments business.
As time evolved, a number of our customers were also looking to use stablecoins for any number of different reasons.
Either they didn't like the volatility of a native asset, even though the volatility was quite damp given the short period of time it takes to transact on the XRP ledger,
or they may have had restrictions given their own governance, depending upon the type of company or service provider, etc.
So as Lauren hinted at earlier, we like giving optionality to our customers.
Every time you mint RLUSD or do something with RLUSD on the XRP ledger, XRP is used as that native gas token.
And so the more activity, the more utility for RLUSD on the XRPL, it's a net positive for XRPs.
So we interact with XRP in the ledger every single day.
You can think about it as that gas token on the ledger.
And so as I think about it, the more utility we bring overall, and I referenced earlier, that decrypt study is a net positive and shows the value and another use case,
frankly, for XRP. We'll continue to offer XRP to our payments customers. We continue
to use it today. It's really about adding an alternative option for folks who, for whatever
reason, want to use a stable coin. And we think we've got a battle tested now after
a year, institutional grade, highly transparent, highly regulated,
very robust, scalable, stable coin option. And by being vertically integrated, we're able to
really bring a better value to our customers since that's what we're really excited about.
And frankly, that's a large part of the reason why Ripple decided to get into the stable coin bin
business after being an active user of both USDT and USDC
in our payment flows.
Absolutely.
Lauren, I want to ask a follow-up for you there.
How, if at all, does the institutional DeFi roadmap that Ripple's pursuing on the XRPL
tie into this?
Because when I think about Ethereum, I think about the trusted settlement layer that institutions
can rely on as battle tested.
But when I think about all that Ripple is doing to lay out this institutional DeFi roadmap with credentials, token escrow, batch transactions, permission domains, you know, they're making compliance at the base layer.
How, if at all, could that tie into, you know, increased RLUSD adoption on XRPL relative to Ethereum?
Great question.
I will say like XRPL DeFi has always been near and dear to my heart.
I've been a user for a long time.
I'm a proud holder of XRP Doge.
And we have a really incredibly innovative foreign exchange DEX, decentralized exchange,
I should say.
The XRPL DEX has been around for 10, 12 years.
It's battle tested.
It was the first of its kind.
And the team's continued to iterate on that as time has gone on.
And some things I'm really excited about on the XRPL is the lending protocol.
The announcement of Aviva coming out, issuing one of the world's largest asset managers
issuing on the XRPL is incredible.
And we're excited for that for RLEOSD as well.
We know that institutions like that want a trusted, reliable stablecoin for settlement
between different RWAs they might issue or for different reasons.
And on top of that, they want a reliable blockchain to record that settlement as well,
which the XRPL has been for over a decade. I think the second one I'd say there is there's
a PR open right now for getting XRPL supported in the X402 protocol.
That was open by T54.
I think there was also another one from a member of the community.
And there's been a lot of great discussion on agentic payments on the XRPL overall.
I think this is a super exciting use case.
And obviously, RLUSD is perfect as an asset to support these agentic
payments. It's quite possible XRP will be the same. That kind of diversity in what people want
to pay with and what different companies want to receive, that's really what the XRPL DEX is about.
There's a lot of cool features where the DEX sort of manages liquidity for you.
As you try to make a payment,
it can go through a secondary asset
if there ends up being more liquidity there
and it's cheaper.
And so I think like those nuances
and the XRPL's ability to scale
that really, you know,
it's complicated technology
will really set the ledger up well
to support the agentic economy. So I'm really excited about that as well. I think that there's
going to be a ton of DeFi activity coming on chain and we see major institutions leading the way on
the XRPL. Jack, I want to have you chime in if you can too,
if you have any thoughts to add on how these compliance features
coming on natively on the XRPL, if at all,
play into adoption for institutions.
Yeah, I think it's a great question.
And I think a lot about where our adoption is going to come from.
Obviously, there is a growing list of stablecoin issuers.
It's becoming rather trendy. I'd say a couple of things about that. We expect the number of
stablecoin issuers to continue to increase. The Genius Act has really opened the door
for issuance of stablecoins. That said, I think there are different use cases and different target
audiences. And I have the scar tissue to tell you that it's hard work to launch a stable coin if
you want to do it in a heavily regulated, compliant, transparent, robust, scalable,
well-funded way.
And so we've done that.
We know what it takes to do that.
And I think the bar is very high to do that.
We also have in our sites, and we've had this for a while,
so this is not a new use case,
but really building infrastructure for the biggest and the best institutions.
Lauren cited Aviva as one of them,
and then coming on chain really helped prove out the thesis
that what institutions want is a trusted counterparty.
We think about the migration of traditional finance into the
Web3 space as more evolution than revolution. And I grew up in the traditional finance space,
working for broker dealers and investment banks, et cetera. And I know that many traditional buy
and sell side firms are slow to move. They're very conscious of the regulatory status that's hard-earned and very near and dear to their business.
And so they look for other kindred spirit, if you will, organizations that have that same level of scrutiny and regulatory compliant focus in terms of running their business.
And they're going to seek out partners who have a similar sort of ethos.
And so we want to meet those type of folks
in the middle. And so the sort of features that we build, the sort of features that we
encourage the community to build are really in service to that. And we think that a lot
of the amendments that Ripple has supported are focused on making the XRPL ready for institutions like privacy, compliance,
et cetera.
And so we're really encouraged by what we see.
If you think about the use case for institutions, it's really about moving large amounts of
value without exposing sense of information and still being able to share details with
regulators and take advantage
of everything that a blockchain would offer.
And that can be a fine line, you know, to navigate doing that.
And so it will take some time to see wide scale adoption and migration, but it's slow
and steady.
And we've got a great team of people who are engaged in the conversations with those folks
and we're on the journey with them.
The journey helps inform what we're building,
how we think about the business,
and we like to think that we're good partners
to the sort of clients that we're working with.
The last thing I would say is that,
we can talk a little bit about this later,
but the recent acquisitions that Ripple made,
specifically of G-Treasury
and of the Hidden Road business, bring with them a whole cadre of institutions
that we're now able to engage more broadly with the different products and services.
And certainly, RLUSD is one of the assets that we have now in our portfolio that can really spread across any number of different products
and really be fully integrated across the client base.
Yeah, that's great. When I think of evolution versus revolution, one thing that came to mind
that you spoke of recently was tokenized money market funds. I want to get out of that on the
weekend. I want to get into something else. Can you just paint the picture of that a little bit
concretely, some of those unique use cases of the evolution, just so that the audience can
really understand it?
Yeah, we get asked a lot about the difference between a stable coin and a tokenized deposit,
for example. And one of the ways that I find helpful for me to think about it is the difference between a savings account and a checking account for this concept of money at rest versus money
in transit. And I think those two go together. Sometimes you think
about your longer term savings, which could be a deposit where you're not really moving that money
frequently. And then you think about more of a transactional account where money's coming in and
out of and you want to use it and you extrapolate that into a 24-7 need you have. We've been lulled
into thinking, and this is not a bad thing,
but that we have access to our money 24 seven
because we have Venmo and we have PayPal, et cetera.
But behind the scenes,
there's still a lot of lag in terms of how that money moves.
Right?
So the veneer or the UI makes it very user friendly,
you know, to pay somebody, you know, instantaneously.
But I think as everybody on this call, I'm sure knows,
is the money doesn't actually move that quickly. Whereas the stablecoin truly helps move money
on chain really instantaneously and settle instantaneously. And so when you think about
the institutional use case, institutions are not moving money overnight or over weekends when banks are closed, et cetera,
via Venmo or PayPal. They need to move big amounts of value and they need to do it securely and
compliantly within their systems. And so stable coins are just an ideal use case for those sort
of transactions. A recent announcement we made was through a partnership with DBS and Franklin Templeson in Singapore, where DBS clients can trade RLUSD for the SING-BENJI
token, which basically allows them to rebalance their portfolios into a relatively stable
asset 24-7 within minutes, and then start earning yield during periods of volatility.
And that wouldn't be able to be achieved
if you were in a traditional finance sort of analog world
when the banks are closed or the markets are closed.
And so just one very tangible use case,
we're doing something similar with BlackRock and VanEck
where we've used RLUSD for instant liquidity and settlement.
You hit the smart contract there and you can 24-7
convert your biddle or your V-bill into RLUSD. We recently announced an exciting partnership with
LMAX, who is using RLUSD as a core collateral asset across their trading infrastructure. So
for customers who want to leverage RLUSD for cross asset collateralization and margin efficiencies
into spot crypto, perps, CFD trading, et cetera. It becomes this very fungible sort of asset that
really unlocks a lot of financial opportunities now for institutions that just hitherto were not
available. We've also got interactive brokers for 24-hour funding. So I could go on and on,
but those are the sort of
opportunities that we get excited about. No, I love that. I think that's what we want to hear,
but I'll briefly pivot right now, Lauren. RLUSD multi-chain, you know, has announced
that a number of Ethereum LL2s are going to be home to RLUSD, Optimism-based Unichain. Do you
have updates to share beyond that initial announcement? Yeah, I think I kind of skipped ahead earlier.
I was pretty excited to talk about this one.
But talking about our multi-chain strategy overall, like I said, we're tracking a few different things as we could continue to drive utility of XRP wherever we end up issuing our USD.
So, for example, on the four super chain chains you brought up, you've got Kraken XRP, Coinbase XRP, Hextrust XRP, Universal XRP.
You can go on and on.
The demand for the asset is so significant.
I think in Ripple, there was a ton of demand to have the world-class compliant stablecoin
really to access that native asset on chain.
And so I think that there's a million different use cases that exist today.
When you start talking about different blockchain ecosystems, it's hard to narrow down into,
you know, a top three even that will be utilized.
three even that will be utilized. But we want to stay focused on XRP usage today and how that
continues to grow moving forward. And I think something else I would kind of offer there is,
of course, we also have a ton of use cases with Ripple Prime, Ripple Treasury. And we saw an announcement recently, Ripple Prime just went live on Hyperliquid.
And those kinds of use cases will continue to allow hedge funds and different institutional
users to access XRP spot or prop trading futures.
xrp spot or you know prop trading and futures in these different communities you can find
you know there's nuance and different things excite each community um and so i think i've
been pretty excited about the way we've been expanding and you know really keeping up with that demand. I think, and working with Hidden Roads customer base as well,
like wherever sort of Ripple Prime moves forward,
RLUSD is always requested as well.
So we definitely want to keep up with customer demand
in that way.
I think when you talk about wrapped XRP strategy overall, and, you know, in Q4 last year,
there was a huge announcement from the Solana Foundation. It was one of their most interacted
with Twitter posts ever, I believe. It was about XRP. And, you know, when we see things like that,
that's huge demand from the community. And so as we continue to look forward,
like I haven't even brought up Flare XRP, like there's so many different ways that utility is
being driven in the XRP community. And so we want to continue to issue RSD and provide access points
for a stablecoin as needed to continue to drive
stablecoin use cases for, you know, corporate treasurers through Ripple Treasury and continue
to provide that access point to the different versions of XRP. Definitely. So I guess paraphrasing,
if I could just try to summarize this for the community, you know, there's issuance of wrapped xrp issuance of rl usd on ethereum l2s
because there's so much crypto native demand can we bucket it as thinking about you know this is
to meet crypto native demand for these assets xrp and rl usd and then fundamentally yes we're
willing to have rl usd we're willing to have wrapped xr on these other chains. But ultimately, like, for the long term,
we're building for that demand for XRP, you know, as the base transaction fee on XRPL,
and RLUSD with the institutional roadmap on XRPL as well. Because I think there's, you know,
potentially, you know, community, you know, people listening could think there's some tension there. So just to clarify that.
Yeah, for sure.
Like I said, we want to support XRP wherever it's being utilized.
The XRPL is home base for utilizing XRP.
The XRPL has amazing, you know, we talked about all the amendments earlier.
And those are really going to be, I will say I got caught a little bit on like the crypto
native community, because what's amazing is, you know, the XRPL is really introducing a lot of
non-crypto users to these DeFi institutional use cases and, you know, really making their
lives easier. You know, for Ripple Prime, for example, Jack talked a lot about the different use cases there are,
apologies, earlier I meant to say Ripple Treasury. Quite often treasurers every day at the end of the
day, they end up with a bunch of cash. And that cash is segregated in a bunch of different banks
and they all have different cutoff times. And if you don't do it quickly enough, your cash just
sits idle overnight. Enabling the Ripple Treasury corporates to sweep that cash into RLUSD and then make it work on chain or continue making payments all night long.
Really, it changes foundationally how they'll be able to run their business.
The cost saving is crazy.
So really it's onboarding institutions, I think, on the XRPL is sort of our main focus
and where all USD is winning.
Absolutely.
I would also say, Matt, if I could just jump in, you know, XRP is our North Star here.
And, you know, we believe in a multi-chain world, as Lauren articulated, Brad, even,
you know, since whatever it was, 27 or 2018.
That said, you know, it's XRPL first.
And we happen to believe that the XRP ledger
is the preeminent ledger for a lot of things.
It's not the best ledger for everything, no chain is,
but for the areas of focus that we have in our business,
certainly around payments, around settlement, et cetera,
we actually think it is the best chain.
And you think about the speed, the utility, the price,
the scalability, the security of that chain.
And that's why we are consciously building utility there.
That's why we're encouraging our partners like Binance
to list RLUST and support it there.
So we're pushing opportunities there
because we feel it's the best home for them.
To the extent a customer wants to go somewhere else,
we want to support that,
you know, where it makes sense as well.
And so we are trying to balance those initiatives,
but make no mistake about it,
XRP is the North Star here.
Absolutely.
Yeah, and Lauren,
I appreciate you mentioning payments as a use case
because I think the way to end this is,
you know, maybe we do a rapid fire.
There's so many people listening who might be crypto native, but aren't as familiar with TradFi.
There's so many people who, you know, might be listening from TradFi, but aren't as familiar with, you know, the unique benefits of blockchain XRPL.
So maybe we could just, you know, rapid fire through some of the use cases.
I'd love to start with just institutional settlement.
Let's explain that from the bottom up as a use case for RLUSD. rapid fire through some of the use cases. I'd love to start with just institutional settlement.
Let's explain that from the bottom up as a use case for RLUSD and then we'll just keep
going down the line from there.
I'll take that one, Lauren. You think about a dollar settlement, I think about in many
ways RLUSD as a digital dollar. It acts and has all the attributes of a dollar.
If you think about how we invest our reserves,
it's in cash and treasuries effectively
in some government money market funds.
So anywhere where a dollar can be used
to settle a transaction, so too can RLUSD.
However, settling it on chain adds to the speed,
the efficacy and the security, the finality at a fraction of the cost.
So, you know, we used to settle stock trades and trade date plus two, now we're down to trade date
plus one. You think about that, you think about, and by the way, we're closed, you know, after 4
PM Eastern time, and we're closed on weekends and holidays, where on chain, you can sell that instantaneously for fractions
of a penny on the XRP ledger 24-7. And so think about any transaction that would want to settle
in the US dollar, which is the global reserve currency, and 99% of stable coins are dollar
backed. And that just is a major unlock for all sorts of capital markets and commerce needs around the world.
Yeah. Next one, payments from first principles, if you just want to take that one real quick, Lauren.
Yeah. So one of the payments use cases I love is payroll. You think about payroll,
it seems so simple. We work for two weeks and then we get paid for the two weeks.
simple. We work for two weeks and then we get paid for the two weeks. It can get so complicated
so quickly. You think about paying at scale. I'm really excited about batch transactions for this.
Basically, RLUSD is already on a number of payroll platforms. I think we will continue to see, you know, the globalness of money be sort of enabled
via RLSD.
Like today, if you have employees, you know, in six different countries, the likelihood
you're paying in six different currencies is really high.
And now you have a cost related to getting all six of those currencies.
And, you know, they could be different than your basic operating currency for your business. And so I think enabling RLUSD in payroll, allowing payroll to be,
you know, the data will be more streamlined and you'll be able to get, you know, to have just in
time funding. So today, many payroll companies, they fund two weeks out and it takes, you know,
ACH payments take however long needed, depending on the jurisdiction.
So you'll be able to send the RLUSD out and have that immediately settle with your employees.
And me, I'm generally a non-custodial user, like being able to have that version of e-money directly in my wallet.
I'm sorry, I should have said a stablecoin directly in my wallet instead of getting e-money in my bank account.
Like that gives me a lot more control over my money.
And so I'm really excited for that future.
I have a couple of things as well to announce from the team.
We have the final swag drop of the day. Our RippleX account is sharing
the link in the comments of this space. So sign up, enter to win one. I saw a picture of Brad
signing these, so it's pretty cool. And yeah, that's all for me. Cool. Thank you so much, Lauren.
We're going to close out with just what's next for RLUSD.
But before that, I'd just love for you, Jack, to finish and just run down real quick, you know, the other use cases for people to understand capital markets, Ripple grants, collateral.
Just explain those real quick for people who might not know.
Yeah, in the capital markets world, generally speaking, the U.S. dollar has been posted as collateral.
So if I want to borrow something, I want to borrow money or if I want to borrow a stock,
brokers or exchanges will require me to put up something as collateral to offset the loan or the bet I'm looking to make.
And so where U.S. dollars have historically been accepted,
we're pushing hard to have RLUSD accepted given the complexity or the composition, I should say,
of what underlies every RLUSD, namely cash and treasuries. And getting exchanges and regulators
to see it our way is really exciting. And we're making some real inroads there. And so working with our colleagues within Ripple Prime
have been a big unlock.
They've been accepting stable coins as collateral
as a cross asset class collateral piece for years
and being able to vertically integrate with our USD
adds further benefits for their customer base
because they can do so in a cheaper way.
So that's a big unlock for them.
Payments, being able to move money, as I mentioned, 24-7 around the world
and unleashing opportunities to monetize trapped capital
that would otherwise be stuck on evenings and weekends and holidays
is a big, exciting development for our Ripple
Treasury folks, the legacy key treasury customers, those corporate customers who have payments to
make either domestically or internationally on the domestic side, while the currency doesn't change,
being able to settle instantly, which I referenced earlier, is a big unlock and more
capitally efficient. And for cross-border payments, where some of these corporates didn't have the easy solution
presented to them, now through the Ripple Payments Direct product and RLUSD, we're able
to deliver a more efficient way of moving money around the world.
And so that's really exciting.
We think about other opportunities within the prime brokerage business,
just in terms of lending out RLUSD,
or in terms of enhancing settlement times for transactions,
really the list goes on and on.
And so we're excited about everything we see in payments
and the capital markets, that's where our area of focus.
Within the payments side, you mentioned that that grants or payments that could be philanthropic in nature.
We've been doing a lot of work with some Ripple subsidiaries, Ripple Impact and
Ripple Works in terms of making grant payments that would be cross border and
multiple currencies and being able to streamline that through a stable coin
that has the advantage of being tied to streamline that through a stable coin that has the advantage
of being tied to the US dollar, particularly for inflationary countries. I could go on and on with
the use cases. But you put those all together, we're going to see a lot more institutional
adoption and we're going to see a lot more market cap growth. Absolutely. I think that could be a
place to leave it. But any last words, Jack or Lauren, on what's next for RLUSD beyond that growth?
Lauren, anything on your end?
I'm good. It's been really amazing to hang out with the SRP community here.
I'm really excited to pass it off to David Schwartz.
100%. David, it's all yours.
but it's all yours.
I think David joined as a listener,
so he might need to rejoin as a speaker.
Can you hear me?
Oh, there we go.
We got him.
All right, you on? Thank you. Come on off mute, Eric. Oh, did I get it to work?
There you are.
I'm so sorry.
Mic check.
I thought I was going to repeat what happened last time.
And so happy that I am with you, David.
Yeah, I want to thank Jack, Lauren, and Matt.
And I'm happy that we've had such an amazing day.
Hello, everyone. I'm Eddie that we've had such an amazing day. Hello, everyone.
I'm Eddie Ishiama.
And I've been known since 2018 as Crypto Eddie on social media.
And thanks so much to Ripple and everyone for this amazing XRP Community Day.
It's turned out to be really a global virtual gathering that brought together holders, builders, businesses, and everybody's been able to dive deep into the innovation and the exciting future for the XRP Ledger.
And today we're going to now bring it home with some closing questions.
And we have the CTO emeritus at the company Ripple.
And we have the CTO emeritus at the company Ripple.
David, your years of patient education, brilliant technicals, insights, the unwavering engagement, you've you poured into this, inspiring all of us over the years.
So, yeah, everybody, please, yeah, join in and give a huge welcome to the one and only Joel David Schwartz Katz.
Hello, David. Yeah, we'll jump right into the questions, but please say hello to everyone first.
Hello, everyone. Thanks for that introduction. I just want to say, I've said this before,
and I always get emotional when I say it, the community really does mean everything to me.
We have the strongest community in the space where I can't even speak words.
It's such an emotional thing for me.
It means so much to me that what we built,
what everyone has built is so important to people
and means so much to people.
I really, I cannot put it in words.
Yeah, it is a little emotional
and you've got a new chapter.
And it's really been wonderful to see that you've stayed deeply engaged with the community on X alongside the role that you have as the board now at Ripple.
Or you're on the board, you have the XRPL Foundation Board, you have the Evernorth Board.
I wonder, are you still going to be joining us and the community with this
engagement? Will it continue? I think so. I mean, it's been, it's been, it has been a little less
the past two months than it had been in the previous months. You know, I had my first board
meeting as a, as a Ripple board member. I spoke, you know, I've done some stuff for EverNorth and
the XRPL foundation, but it's definitely, it's definitely been less for the past two months.
And I think that was just kind of the newness of, you know, not being forced to, you know, not being every minute of my day to day.
I think I'm going to be more interested in pursuing some technical things, meeting with community members.
You know, I'm going to be going to XRP Australia in two weeks.
I'm really looking forward to that and seeing the community members. You know, I'm going to be going to XRP Australia in two weeks. So I'm really looking forward to that and seeing the community again. Honestly, I don't really know yet what my
level of involvement is going to be other than the specific commitments that I've made,
you know, to the XRPL Foundation, to the board, you know, for Ripple and Evernorth. But I think
I'm going to pursue, I mean, obviously the technical stuff is very interesting to me and
XRP is an ecosystem that still is very much in a technical growth phase.
I think it contrasts strongly with Bitcoin, which just really the core technology of Bitcoin isn't really evolving like the core technology around the XRP ledger still is.
So, I mean, that's what's the most interesting to me.
It's not as well the most important thing.
You know, the entire ecosystem is important.
The ETFs are important.
Enterprise adoption is important.
But obviously, the blockchain technical stuff is the most personally interesting to me because it's where my skill set and knowledge fits.
So it's interesting to me that that's still growing in the XRP ecosystem.
So that's probably what's going to keep me involved.
And, of course, the people, just, you know, all the friendships and relationships that I built.
I'm not just going to get rid of those.
Yes. It's quite an amazing, full and robust ecosystem now. And I'm sure that you have some
ideas of what types of contributions that you want to do now that maybe you weren't able to do before, like strategic research or mentoring? Maybe some
deep dives or possibly a white paper with one of your own projects? Is there something lurking out
there? You know, I'm not really sure yet. You know, I have my hub and I'm going to be running a validator soon. I'm running
some interesting tests on there to try to understand things about how the software is
performing in the real world. There's a lot of design decisions that were made by myself and
other people, you know, eight plus years ago based on what the network looked like then,
what computers looked like then, you know, what the space looked like then.
And I'm interested in seeing, you know, did we make some of those decisions? Are they still right?
There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of stuff in the code that we just picked numbers that worked
at the time and there's tuning to be done. I'm very interested in helping people find things to
do that are interesting in the space. I mean, businesses, enterprise adoption.
My vision is that DeFi is gonna replace TradFi. And in order to do that, DeFi has to be able to do
all the stuff that people need TradFi to do.
So I think you're gonna see a lot of visionary stuff from me,
a lot of XRP ledger tech from me,
but also, I mean, I'm gonna spend a lot of time,
you know, just relaxing.
I think the past two months,
I did just sort of spend a lot of time not doing anything, just relaxing. I think the past two months, I did just sort of spend a
lot of time not doing anything. And I haven't gotten bored yet, although I think probably
boredom is going to bring me back too. But you know, I spent a lot of time with family. And I
spent a lot of time just, just reading and watching TV and getting back to my hobbies and stuff. And
we'll see how long that that stays interesting. Yeah, I know that everybody is super happy that you're running Infra.
And I don't doubt that you'll be doing some, I don't know, personal prototypes, code experience, maybe some data dives.
I look forward to, you know, getting more from what you're able to do with that infrastructure.
from what you're able to do with that infrastructure. Let's jump to that hobby question
really quick, because you talked about in your announcement that you wanted to return to hobbies
that you set aside for years. What would those hobbies be, if I may ask?
You know, the biggest one is that I used to fly small planes. I even commuted by air to work for a couple of months, more than like 20 plus years ago.
And until two weeks ago, I hadn't flown a plane in 15 years.
And so two weeks ago, I flew a plane for the first time in 15 years with a flight instructor.
Obviously, I don't want to die.
For those of you who are aviation nerds, it was a Cir sr20 uh g7 and um which is a single engine plane but it's
much faster and much more technologically advanced than anything that i've flown before and uh if i'll
say i was hoping that i would it would be like i'd never left um if i hadn't had a flight instructor
i still would have landed the plane safely and i would have been alive and you would have even
been able to use the plane again afterwards.
But that's about all I can say. I was really, really rusty.
I'm kind of hoping I would do better. But, you know, after one flight in a plane, I've never flown before.
But yeah, I mean, aviation was was probably my biggest hobby.
And again, I hadn't flown a plane in 15 years and I used to enjoy it so much.
So I'm really hoping I'll get back to that.
Although my first flight wasn't super encouraging.
Oh, I didn't know that.
So that's really fun to learn.
You also described this ride that you've been on is wild.
One that's full of paradoxes.
And I think I'd like to know what is one thing about your
own path, you know, looking at the broader crypto space, okay, that still surprises you,
you know, that you reflect on and you still think to yourself, wow, so surprising.
You know, there's so many things. I'll say probably the two biggest surprising
things. One of them is just that I am such a naturally risk averse person. Like I could never
become a gambler. And yet, like I've been forced into a position of taking lots and lots of risk
and those risks have worked out very well for me, but it's, it sort of creates angst in me that like, you know, I'm just naturally a
very conservative, very risk averse person. I've been put in a situation where the more risk I take,
the better I do. I'm inherently in a very risky space. You know, most of my wealth is tied up in
the most volatile assets that exist in the world. And I obviously, you know, regret, regret nothing. In fact, I wish I'd taken more
risks, but that just is like a paradox in me because I just, I don't, I'm not a person who
likes risk and is comfortable with risk. The other interesting thing is watching from the early
Bitcoin space, there was a lot of libertarian people and a lot of people who are about independence
and about, you know,
be your own bank and middlemen and independence from government. And it's been funny to watch like big crypto now having things like having political power and, you know, having people
having people who feel like like there is such a thing as like big Bitcoin and big crypto.
And there's people who who are now saying like oh you
know you should build on top of cryptocurrencies that currently exist and you shouldn't build new
projects and they you know they have very derogatory terms for them and like the whole ethos in the
beginning was like build what the latest coolest technology and you don't be beholden to the older
technology that you know is decades old and is rich as other. And yet now you see people because they hold the cryptocurrency.
You know, I hold XRP if the value of XRP goes up, that benefits me financially.
And so in a way I would like people to hold and use XRP.
But I have never said to people like,
yeah, I don't tell people like you should hold XRP even if it doesn't make sense for you.
And yet you do see people like having an ethical, like saying that it's almost unethical
to work on other projects. So the way it's become sort of turned to people in their self-interest
in very much the same ways that we condemned in the early days. And I'm not innocent of this.
I'm not, you know, obviously like I have financial interests in Ripple and XRP and everybody in the
space has financial interests. And it's interesting to watch how to some extent that sort of causes them to try to steer people
to the things that, you know, that benefit them. And it's just been interesting to see the sort of
individualism, to some extent, clash with the big business and then sort of make its peace with it
and move on together, just like has happened with the internet, sometimes for good, sometimes,
together, just like has happened with the internet, sometimes for good, sometimes, you know, not so
great. And, you know, it is what it is, but it's one of those paradoxes. Yeah, it surely is. And,
and I can't agree more from the days when I first came in 2014 to the mindset then and the mindset now, it's quite different. Well, let me just move to not
too technical, but this Evernorth product is really looking to be very interesting. And
I think this unique way to leverage the two amendments that are coming, 65 and 66, the single vaults and the lending protocol.
These are, I think, of some great interest to everybody. And I want to know from you,
how does it create an advantage for the XRP ledger to lead that institutional trad fi
into the DeFi? How's that going to really give us some, you know, leg up?
So I'll start from a sort of broad view and then kind of zoom in a little bit.
Broadly, I do think DeFi is going to replace TradFi. And in order for it to do that,
it's going to have to provide the stuff that everybody needs out of TradFi. We're not going
to do it with cryptocurrency speculation,
gambling, and over collateralized, you know, loans over collateralized by crypto. Not that those are bad things, not that there aren't markets for those things. We've grown to something like $150
billion, you know, DeFi ecosystem on those things, but that's not going to, you know, that's not going
to get into the multi-trillion dollar, you know, eat into into Tradbuy. We're going to have to do the stuff that like ordinary people need. And right now,
that can't come from inside the cryptocurrency space. It just isn't big enough. And it doesn't
have enough sort of economic activity. We need things like treasuries. We need things like,
you know, tokenized real world assets that are, you know, equities, stocks, bonds, you know,
money market funds, all of those things that like
and payments are going to have to plug into the rest of the world because until everybody's on
crypto you know or on blockchains or in defy we have to be able to get money in and out so we if
if we're gonna have defy grow beyond where it's kind of been stuck at 150 billion dollars for two
years now and some of the growth has been illusory. It's just come from the fact that cryptocurrency prices
have gone up rather than from like the market really growing.
And the reason that we're stuck is because we can't do
the stuff that normal people need.
And one of the like most traditional TradFi functions
is lending.
And what's interesting to me, you know, banks lend.
That's like the core business of a bank is to lend.
And so lending is the core
TradFi business. And what's interesting to me is not so much on the borrower side, but the lending
side, because lending is how banks make their money. And lending is a rational investment that
makes sense for a lot of people to participate in, but it does have some problems. One of them
is that you may get locked in a loan for a long period of time until the loan gets paid back. So
if you lend somebody money for 10 years and you need money tomorrow,
then you have to go through this mess of trying to sell the loan,
which can be annoying.
It's also hard to know how a portfolio of loans is performing.
So what happens with,
with amendment 65 and 66 on the XRP ledger is these are trad fi loans in the
sense that somebody does credit worthiness off chain. You have to do that.
You have, if it, unless it's going to be over collateralized, which is a niche product,
someone has to decide who deserves a loan and who will be able to pay it back.
And then you have to deal with the problem with,
well, what if the person who wanted to pay the loan back can't?
What if they have potential bankruptcy or insolvency?
What if you have to sue them?
You're not going to sue them on chain, right?
You're going to have to sue them and you might have to, you know,
there's all kinds of actions that might take place. And so what 65 and 66 do on the XI
for Ledger is they let all that stuff take place off chain. So it's very much trad by
lending, except the portfolios of loans are tokenized. So that means you can contribute
to the money that's lent out. And then you have a portfolio of loans and you can see
the value of that on the DAX next so you can sell your portfolio if
you need money tomorrow and you didn't expect to you can sell if you want to get into a portfolio
of loans it's doing well you can see what's doing well by the pricing and you can buy it and then
you can also tell if if loans are in jeopardy the price of the of the token will fall and so you'll
be able to assess from day to day, the performance of your
portfolio. And the special niche for the XRP Ledger and the reason why I think the XRP Ledger
is so well positioned to do this is because it does not have smart contracts. Now I know
that sounds like a disadvantage, but normally on other platforms, you couldn't implement this kind
of functionality without smart contracts. And there's two problems with smart contracts.
One of them is that the person who creates the smart contract generally arranges some way of them sort of owning or
controlling. Like if you look at traditional DEXs like on Ethereum, most of them are owned and
managed by a small group. And there's multiple competing DEXs on the same chain. These would be
core XRP ledger features. So there might be competing portfolios of loans, but they'll all
be subject to
the same rules and all the tools will know how to use them and so you won't have the risk of
smart contract problems or bugs in the smart contract or competing smart contracts you'll
have a unified feat you know best in class implementation presented by the ledger and I
think tradify loans are one of those things that just the potential market, like, you know, the potential market for cryptocurrency trading and speculation is kind of stuck at one hundred and fifty billion billion.
But the potential market for Tradify loans is way in the trillions.
So I think it's a it's a much bigger market and I think it will help get the whole DeFi ecosystem out of this like two year stall that it's been in.
Well, that's really something to
look forward to. And I, I can't wait till it reaches the consensus from the voting validators.
Looks like it's on its way. I've been monitoring it daily and it's, it's, it's getting up there. So it'll be fantastic when it passes. Let's go back to some of this, what has been
most astonishing, if you will, for the adoption trends or a use case that you've seen emerge
that you did not anticipate. You know, the biggest one, and it's so strange,
this is something that has been very, very surprising to me,
is when we first started looking
at tokenized real world assets,
I wasn't too sure of the use case
because I kind of originally was thinking
that like it would be DeFi native stuff
that would be where the growth would be. And I didn't really see that it would be pulling in
the sort of you know the sort of trap that sort of trap price stuff but the thing that was most
surprising to me was the reason why enterprises were interested in tokenized real world assets
this was sort of shocking to me so like first I thought well tokenized real world assets are not all that interesting because you know you're just using the ledger to do
something that really could be done off off chain and then the other thing was that like well i
wouldn't think enterprises would adopt it unless they thought it would really be transformative
like why would they change all the technology they're using for tracking and managing assets
if they didn't like they didn't drink the kool-aid and they didn't think it was going to take over the world and the shocking thing to me was this is so weird major enterprises were interested
in tokenized real world assets and willing to do things like tokenized treasuries because it could
save them very small amounts of money it sounds silly but if you think about it like if you're
if you're selling tokenized u.s treasuries your customers might be getting you
know two percent yield three percent yield and they're shopping around for who's going to get
them the best yield so your margin is razor thin you're talking about you know if you can make one
you know two percent of one percent you know a couple of basis points you're doing well in the
market so if you can save even a tiny amount of money the biggest problem for these companies is
auditability.
So they can go to an auditor and they can say, these are the assets we're supposed to have,
and these are the assets we do have, and you can see that they match. But the thing that they can't
do is they can't prove absence. So let's say they have a billion dollars worth of treasuries and
their books say they should have a billion dollars worth of treasuries. The problem is,
what if there's another $200 million worth of treasuries they're supposed to have that aren't on their books? And so their books
look fine, but there's some customer who thinks they're holding hundreds of millions of dollars
of treasuries that aren't in their books. Blockchains provide proof of absence trivially.
For example, if you want to look at how much RLUSD has been issued on the XRP ledger, anyone
can do it at any time. And so auditability for RLUSD, Ripple does it, but anyone can do it at any time and so auditability for rl usd ripple does it but anyone can do it
you can go check how much rl usd has been issued and you know for sure that there isn't somebody
who's been issued rl usd on the xrp ledger that isn't that isn't on the ledger because it's on
the ledger or it's not and so what we discovered was that even even companies that didn't didn't
believe in blockchains they didn't think that it was the future, they weren't ready to drink the Kool-Aid.
They still were very interested in tokenized real-world assets on the XRP ledger because
it was cheaper for them than hiring a third party to manage their books and then paying
the third party and the auditor.
When they needed to be audited, the auditor would have to go to the third party to get
the records and so they were paying the auditor and the third party and the blockchain is a third party that's basically free and that
auditors can can track at any time and so the weird thing for me was that people were interested
and we saw the same thing with banks with odl in the very early days like banks didn't necessarily
know about xrp or care about xrp but they said hey
if using xrp as an intermediary asset can save me some money on my payments i don't care how you do
it i like saving money on my payments why wouldn't i and sort of the same thing happened if they
saved money on auditability and they saved money on proof of absence and they saved money on
transaction fees and they could trade 24 7 they didn't have, they didn't have to agree with me
that the technology was transformative.
It was just enough that it would give them
a small competitive edge.
And so I was very, very surprised at the rate of adoption
of tokenized real-world assets,
even by companies that didn't necessarily believe in crypto.
Yeah, it went fast.
I totally agree with you. One last question before we jump to the community
questions. And I know over the decades, you've crossed paths with many in this crypto space,
from the Bitcoin pioneers to the modern players, especially in the TradFi now world.
players in, especially in the TradFi now world. Who's one person outside the immediate Ripple XRPL
circle that you met along the way and found particularly memorable or influential?
You know, there were a lot of people I could mention, but I will, I will call out a couple
people and then I'll mention one. So one person I have to call out is Roger Beer, who like, you know, he's had a weird, he's had a weird story arc in the Bitcoin space as Bitcoin Jesus and to some extent as a pariah.
But he was just an extremely interesting person and someone who really lived by his principles and who never did something if he didn't think that it was the right thing to do and who really thought deeply about society and about the relation relationships
among people and and he was just just a wonderful person to deal with there were a lot of people in
the in the crypt in the cryptocurrency space some of which also like you know relationships didn't
work out well but who were just just fantastic people in the early bitcoin space some of the true
some of the true believers who really thought that Bitcoin could be a tool against oppression.
And I think it still could be. I think cryptocurrency still will.
But I absolutely have to call out Vitalik.
Vitalik, he was just very smart.
And, you know, he and Stephan Thomas and I had some great debates about how to structure blockchains
and where the technology was going.
He could reason about things very, very quickly.
It's unfortunate that we couldn't hire him.
That didn't work out.
There's an interesting alternative universe where Ripple is able to hire Vitalik.
I would love to catch up with him again and talk about maybe some of the future ideas
about the paths that smart contracts
can take and some of the stuff we did with Codeus. But he was just smart, a quick thinker,
and he could reason about complex blockchain systems very, very quickly. And I miss talking
to him. Yeah, that would be amazing if your paths crossed again in the future. And Roger Veer is also someone I met before the fork of Bitcoin in Tokyo.
And he did so much for the adoption of Bitcoin in Japan that he is truly amazing.
Can we jump to the community questions?
I don't want to miss the people who submitted these.
The first one comes from Bank XRP. He says, with regulatory clarity resolved in the United States and RLUSD
is live, what do you see as the single biggest remaining barrier for institutional adoption of
XRP? And what concrete progress has made Ripple or that Ripple has made in the last six to 12 months to overcome it?
I think as the regulatory barriers come down and many of them have, I think there's still a lot of residual regulatory barriers
that are not so much around the clarity about the status of X up here, RLUSD, but just around things like,
you know, is RLUSD good collateral from a regulatory standpoint and, you know, and around,
you know, the core regulatory clarity is there, but there's still a lot of smaller barriers that
are coming down. And so that's happening very rapidly. There's a lot of progress,
but there's still a lot of like smaller barriers in there. But the biggest single barrier for institutional adoption, I think, is volatility. It's just
difficult for institutions to hold a volatile asset. It just is. They don't, you know, they
don't like, they don't like the sort of volatility. It messes up their, their accounting and so on.
And there's a couple of different things that Ripple and others have been working on, you know,
in the, in the very early days, the original idea of odl was that you would only have to hold xrp for you know a minute or so while
the payment took place but what's interesting about the way that works is that means that if
you're a bank who's making a payment and you don't want to hold xrp because of the volatility
you don't have to hold it for very long because you can just use it to make the payment but the
reason that works is because somebody else is holding it, right?
You can get the XRP when you need it.
You can buy it and then sell it.
You buy it in one place and then sell it someplace else to move money.
And the reason you can do that is because there's someone who's willing to sell it to you and there's someone who's willing to buy it from you.
And those people are willing to do it because they're okay with the volatility.
And so what you can do is you can sort of shift.
If you think about it, if you hold RLUSD and you don't like volatility, you have two things. You have the possibility
that XRP will go up and you'll make money. And you have the possibility that XRP will go down
and you'll lose money. And because you're risk averse, even though most people would say that
the upside outweighs the downside, you don't want them because there's a net risk in holding them.
And so what you can do is you can sort of sell off the upside and the downside to somebody else.
And that's effectively what ODL did, right?
The market makers are taking the risk of the volatility,
and you're sort of paying them to have XRP available when you need it.
So what we've been working on, you know, ever since ODL and on to this day,
on to tools that use sort of XRP underneath things where there's XRP activity going on
or XRP is used as collateral
or XRP is used to move money,
but it's not held by the end users.
Those kinds of tricks to get around the volatility.
But I still do think that even bigger than,
like I think the volatility is the single biggest barrier,
but I think in aggregate,
all the smaller regulatory barriers,
I think are still bigger. And I think those aggregate, all the smaller regulatory barriers, I think, are
still bigger. And I think those are coming down one by one. Like we're seeing great progress on
stable coins in the United States. We're seeing great progress on institutions being able to use
digital assets, you know, around the world. I still think that most of the barriers to
institutional adoption are regulatory. There's just not one big barrier anymore.
Oh, yeah.
I like that synergy between the two.
They're complementary.
I like that.
This is a question from Khaled Elowadi.
And he is, yeah, he's been in this space a long time.
He'd like to ask you, David, how major are agentic payments going to be?
You know, that's a great question. I can see two worlds. And in many spaces, so just like in the
internet, you could see two worlds for information. You could see one world where everybody has their
own blog. And you can see one world where everybody goes to X or meta. And we've switched off between those two worlds
in the internet space.
And this is the same kind of thing.
So you can imagine two worlds.
So in one world, agentic payments are huge.
Everybody uses agents for all kinds of things.
And if my agent needs something,
it needs some historical information,
it needs some stock analysis,
it needs whatever data it needs.
It goes in pay or computing power
or storage or access to a market or it pays for it. And so you can imagine a world where there's
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of agents out there, maybe, you know, thousands for individual
people, hundreds of like institutional agents that do things. And all of these agents are just
paying each other for very small things. Kind of like what happens when you walk down the street,
you know, in your life today, probably you did things that you didn't think had anything to do
with the internet that had everything to do with the internet. You may have walked into a store
and a camera, you know, may have noticed you, you may have driven down the street and a camera
picked you up. You may have gone into a bank. Like there's internet stuff. Internet of things
stuff is all around us. Your phone is interacting with things. And we may have this world where there's just agentic payments everywhere. Everything we do,
there's agentic payments. Just like everything you do right now, something happens on the internet.
That's one world. And we could be in that world. But the other world is where like,
I contract with some company, maybe it's Google, maybe it's Amazon, maybe it's open AI,
or maybe it's, you know, some company doesn't exist right now. And what happens is they run my agents for me. And when my agent needs something,
they use another agent. Let's say it's OpenAI, just picking a company. So I have an account with
OpenAI. And if my agent does things, what happens is OpenAI has contracts with these various
different companies that operate these agents. And so I get a bill from OpenAI for, you know,
operate these agents. And so I get a bill from OpenAI for, you know, $32 plus, you know, $7
in this weird usage stuff. And maybe that consists of thousands of one penny payments.
But what happened is OpenAI has aggregated it for me and they send a $300,000 check to the guy who
operates some stock analysis system or whatever. And in that world, there aren't agentic payments,
right? Just like, you know, if you do cloud computing today, you might do cloud computing at Amazon, you might do thousands of things, but you just get a bill from Amazon.
And you could imagine a thing where a world where these aggregators contract for everything and
there aren't agentic payments, right? The payments are just tried by big settlements between big
companies that aggregate these millions of agentic payments. And I don't know which world we're going
to wind up in. I like the world better where there are agentic payments and And I don't know which world we're going to wind up in. I like the world
better where there are agentic payments and everything is independent, but I like the world
better where everybody had their own blog rather than like, you know, X and Meta having control
over everybody's information. And the internet doesn't always do what I think it should do best.
So I think we're probably going to wind up in one extreme or the other, just like we did with
the internet. I just don't know which. I like one better, but the world doesn't bend to my preferences.
It's going to be a wild ride. That's for sure.
Let's see if we can squeeze two more in. Mind of
Remy. He says, my layered questions for the freshly retired
Joel Katz, although David, I don't see that you're retired, but
yeah, okay. What kind of use cases do
you see for digital assets that retail builders may be able to tackle that may not necessarily
be financed focused? So I still think that finance is the best fit because if you look at the
features, the trust minimization and trustlessness and the decentralization,
where are those things the most important when money's involved? So I do think that like that's
probably the biggest thing. I think like it's hard to find the less finance focused use cases.
I think authenticity, product authenticity might make, you know, might make sense. But I'll tell
you what I do think
are the two biggest. So one of them is collectibles. The NFT, to some extent, it had a good run and
maybe it's over. But I do think that collectibles are still going to be big and probably going to
grow again. Maybe not quite the way they did with NFTs. But I do think that there is room for people
to own a piece of a thing you know and that can be a that
can have a digital asset in it but you know i'm a little skeptical the other one is gaming um i i
think it solves a real problem in gaming when you make games when you make a new game you want the
people in the old game to move to the new game you don't want to have you know you know if you have
three games that each have a million users then every feature you build can be used by a million
users you have to build features in three different games to like have a million users, then every feature you build can be used by a million users.
You have to build features in three different games to have a new feature for all your users.
If you could get everybody over to the newest game, all three million of your users, you
build one feature and three million people get it.
That's a much better model.
You want to deprecate your older games because that way you can focus all of your efforts
in just one and attack the largest possible audience.
One of the problems that people have is when you move from an old game to a new game,
you lose all of your, you lose like everything that you had.
In fact, I just recently moved to Path of Exile 2 and one really, my son got it for me as a
present for my birthday. And I noticed all of my Path of Exile 1 stuff, like I got stuff in Path
of Exile 2 because I had played Path of Exile 1.
I'm like, oh, that's really cool. I'm not starting from zero.
I don't feel so bad about leaving behind all of the stuff that I built in this other game because I get some of it.
And you could imagine blockchain-based tokenizations for movement of things between games that could give some of that experience.
But I have to say, I'm still a little bit skeptical.
I do think that
finance-focused is probably where the biggest growth is. Although I understand it's been a
little stalled over the past two years because we can't attack mainstream finance use cases.
But I think we need to figure out how to tackle mainstream finance use cases. That's where the
real trillions of dollars is going to be. Yeah, it seems like we're moving in that direction. And I do hope also there's a rebirth
or a second life of NFTs. I think the multipurpose token on the ledger has a chance to catapult that
new second life. But anyway, let's go to... I'll keep my fingers crossed. Yeah, me too. Okay,
we'll go to the last question here by Gordy. Oh, hang on there, Gordy, I'll do it.
Fibian, okay, and he says, real adoption and progress seems to hinge less on announcements and more on integration friction. What's the biggest non-technical bottleneck for the XRP ledger based use cases?
non-technical bottleneck for the XRP ledger-based use cases.
Yeah, yeah. Integration friction is exactly the problem, right? You can't have one great thing.
It's just not, nobody would have a smartphone for one great thing. Nobody would have a computer. Well,
maybe some people would have computers for one great thing, but it would be a niche. You know,
it would be like, maybe, you know, if you're a writer, you'd have a computer to write, but it
wouldn't like, it wouldn't change the world and it wouldn't be as interesting what's
interesting about you know what's interesting about like smartphones is if you build an android
app and you build an iphone app you build two apps and now you have a potential market of tens or
hundreds of millions of people who can use your app immediately they don't need to buy if they
have internet access and they have a smartphone, right?
You have a target market.
The problem is we don't have a target market of like blockchain users.
We don't have a browser is basically what's missing.
What makes the internet so great is the browser.
If you have something that can be accessed from a browser,
you have hundreds of millions of potential customers.
You have something that can be used by an app.
You have hundreds of millions of potential customers. You have something that can be used by an app. You have hundreds of millions of potential customers.
We don't have that.
We don't have this sort of, we don't have a unified market.
And I don't think that's a technical bottleneck.
And tied very tightly to that is the problem of the quality of the user experience.
Let's be honest, the user experience for blockchain stuff is generally very bad.
And it's mostly because they're not integrated.
And so if you want to use this DeFi thing, it's, you know, it's on this particular blockchain
and it uses this particular wallet and you have to have your assets in this particular
place. And so you're just getting to the point where you can use it. Like, you know how many
wallets I have on different blockchains, how many assets I have, and there's no, no, no
unified user experience. I think it's the user experience and i do think
integration friction is part of what's doing it so we need the browser or the app store experience
in the blockchain space and i don't think there's a lot of technical bottlenecks that i think it's
just a matter of maturity and someone figuring out how to do it and having a revenue model and
having you know a plan um i think that's probably the biggest obstacle right now.
User experience and integration, you know.
Yeah, that will lead to a killer app for sure.
Well, we have reached our time limit.
I want to thank you so much, David.
We're grateful for your thoughtful answers.
And on behalf of this incredible community, every holder, builder, and supporter
who has inspired your working over the years,
thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
And I look forward to seeing you in Australia
just 15 days from now.
And thank you so much.
Do take care.
Yeah, I'll see you then.
Thank you for doing this, Ari.
And again, this community really just,
it means everything to me.
I really mean that.
I can't say that enough.
Thank you to everybody who's believed in what we've done
and found it interesting and used it and talked about it
and come to events like this one.
I'll see you guys in Australia.
Sounds good.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
Host
Ripple
from
Binance-Peg XRP
