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XRP Community Day - EMEA
Recorded: Feb. 11, 2026 Duration: 3:11:06Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. I can't turn, dawg.
I miss you like a motherfuckin' head. I'm going to make a little bit more of a little bit more. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome everybody, this is Brad Garlinghouse.
I am excited to be here, excited to have all of you are here, but welcome to our second
annual XRP Community Day.
This really is a day that's meant for all of you, XRP holders, XRP enthusiasts,
XRP builders, any XRP users, and frankly, everyone in between who is part of this XRP family,
sometimes the XRP army, depending on the topic. But this is about hearing from the whole community,
starting with us here at Ripple and from me, but also hearing from people building on the XRP ledger,
hearing from people in around XRP ETFs, exchanges,
digital asset treasuries, and frankly,
so many others who believe in the utility
and the long-term very transformative opportunity of XRP.
For those of you, this is your second time around,
we had over 250,000
Brad, I believe we may have lost your audio. Thank you. Okay, I'm told you guys lost me at some point there. Maybe somebody give me an indication
that you can hear me now.
that you can hear me now. Hi, Brad. This is Tony. Yeah, we can hear you now.
Hi, Brad, this is Tony.
Yeah, we can hear you now.
Okay, great.
I guess you guys, well, Tony, you tell me,
what did you lose during that intro?
I can rewind as needed.
I believe you were speaking on the utility around XRP,
such as ETFs, digital asset treasury,
and then you cut off.
Oh, so the very beginning, right?
All right, so anyway, the point being that,
like we've got a bunch of different speakers today from across the XRP ecosystem, representing
exchanges, ETF issuers, digital asset treasuries. Last year, some of you guys remember, we had 250,000
listeners. I'm excited to see what we have this year. I'm going to skip a little bit. It's just
the initial time. But look, Tony Edward, I think, needs no introduction.
I assume many of you know him from Thinking Crypto, which truly is one of the most popular
crypto podcasts.
But we're going to talk about the macro view for all.
I think we lost your audio again, Brad.
All the time. I think we lost your audio again, Brad. Tony, we got you.
Yes.
Okay.
So, Brad, you cut out there again.
Maybe I'm going to switch to my laptop off my phone.
I'll be right back.
No problem. Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're all doing well.
Excited for this conversation with Brad.
Of course, the title of this session
will be the era of XRP in capital markets.
So thank you all for joining
and we'll let Brad get connected on his laptop here.
Xspaces has been notorious for having some issues
because it's kind of buggy
as I'm sure many of you have experienced.
So we'll just give him a few minutes to get connected. Thank you. Hey, Tony, can you hear me now?
Yes, coming through loud and clear.
Awesome. Thank you.
We are ready to go, ready to roll.
Awesome. Well, good morning, Brad. Thank you for taking the time to do this and excited for our conversation today.
I believe the last time we spoke was in Miami at Ripple Swell, I think a couple of years ago.
I remember it well. And Ripple Swell Miami was, I thought, a special one.
We're obviously glad to be back here in New York for them now, but thank you for doing that.
And I've talked to you a couple times, obviously, so I look forward to this and more in the future.
Absolutely.
So, Brad, I believe the first and most important question I need to ask you and maybe top of mind for many folks, are you planning to flip any switches soon?
folks, are you planning to flip any switches soon?
Look, I do like this question because I'm always a little bit humored.
And the way I think about this is if there was one magic switch, I promise you, I would
have flipped it.
The way I think about this is there's a culmination of thousands of switches.
And those are switches being turned by Ripple.
Those are switches being turned by Ripple those are switches being turned
by the community represented here by all the different small pieces that collectively I think
have an exponentially increasing impact and so uh look I'm as uh bullish and optimistic as anyone
when I think about the opportunity for XRP uh I promise you that if there is a switch to flip,
a switch to flip, I certainly would.
By the way, I was just talking about maybe some of the switches
at the Ripple office or at your house.
But on a more serious note, Brad,
before we get into all things Ripple and XRP,
I have to ask you about what happened
in the global markets last week.
What do you make of this drawdown
and how does it compare to the past cycles?
That's an important question.
And look, as I tweeted out kind of in the middle of it,
whenever I see people being exceptionally fearful,
I feel greedy. Whenever I see people being really greedy, I feel fearful. But last week was a blood
bath. And, you know, certainly markets have stabilized and now recovering to some degree.
I do want to zoom out a little bit and put this into context. You know, there are a lot of smart
people, many of them on Twitter.
Silver and gold were down somewhere between 12% and around 15% as a sell-off.
Certainly, crypto this year has tracked some of the U.S. equity markets around software and particularly some of the ai stuff uh and then if you zoom out to count your question the drawdown is comparable to the 22 bear cycle uh but it's actually done better than that uh btc
ended down 48 versus 77 in the 22 bear cycle and look you know xrp this year is the best
perform of the major cryptos it's other than Bitcoin, it's the best performing
kind of year to date. The other thing I'll point out is that since the Trump election,
XRP is by far the best performing of the major crypto assets up about 170%.
Bitcoin is basically flat since the Trump election. So, you know, I do, as frustrating as that bloodbath was and kind of continues to be to some degree, I think it's important to zoom out and, you know, look at the broader landscape as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well said.
And markets are cyclical.
We've seen this many times in this asset class.
And it's the same for the stock market and other asset classes as well but brad on that note you know you joined ripple in 2015 and a lot has changed since then we've
seen uh certainly some arduous uh pain points uh you know within the crypto industry especially
under the against the regime but how do you feel about the growth the industry has seen over time
growth the industry has seen over time.
You know, I think that kind of gets to the zoom out point.
And, you know, when I joined in 2015, I first got involved in crypto in 2012 and, you know,
got obviously more involved when I joined Ripple in 2015.
And again, that was, although it's been 10 years, in the grand scheme of things, 10 years
really isn't that
long when you think about money when you think about currency when you think about financial
infrastructure 10 years actually isn't that long and you know honestly had you told me 10 years
ago when i joined ripple that you know we would be having these crypto conversations on a global
stage on certainly a national stage that you literally
see Congress actively debating as I think has been well covered you know there was a
immediate the White House yesterday where Stu Alderody our chief legal officer represented
Team Ripple you know those are things I definitely would not have predicted uh 10 years ago so I I
now we've got a long way to go and I certainly don't want to gloss over that,
but these are massive markets and the opportunity to rewire, accelerate and make the financial
infrastructure more efficient is, I think truly profound. And speaking of infrastructure,
Ripple has made several major acquisitions over the past two years.
What's the strategy for 2026?
Is it integration of those respective acquisitions, additional acquisitions, or both?
Well, I'm super proud of the kind of playing offense last year.
remember that for at least three and a half, four years, Ripple was playing defense. And
And again, you got to remember that for at least three and a half, four years, Ripple was playing defense.
just recently, we've been able to kind of shift that into playing offense again,
and that has felt great. I feel like we lost some time, which is frustrating,
but we're going to work very hard at 2026 to make up that time. I think both of the big
acquisitions we made, one in Hidden Road, which is now called Ripple Prime, and two,
possessions we made, one in Hidden Road, which is now called Ripple Prime, and two, G Treasury,
which we now call Ripple Treasury, are really demonstrative of, I think, too many in the crypto
landscape are focused inside the echo chamber. And we were very focused on going outside of
the echo chamber in bringing traditional finance to crypto. So, you know, I'll use G-TREASURY as an example,
now Ripple Treasury, but G-TREASURY was already,
they have over a thousand corporate clients
where they really are the CFO dashboard,
managing liquidity, deposits, currencies.
And they had 0% penetration
of either digital assets or stablecoin.
So the $13 or $14 trillion that they orchestrated around payments, of which, you know, not a huge percentage, but a material percentage was cross-border, that's just all ripe opportunity.
You know, they had, they, prior to acquisition acquisition had visibility into lots of deposits that are
effectively dormant and not really being optimized around yield. Well, now we can help them with that
using RLUSD and bringing more liquidity on the XRP ledger. So, you know, now the last part of
your question, you're right. This year is much more about integration. You know, we have two
amazing leaders who came on board and joined my team who
now are kind of figuring out how to make sure to integrate some of those things we're just
talking about. But I could not really be much more pleased. I don't mind sharing. I'm here in New York
and we had a team offsite yesterday kind of talking through some of these things as we thought about
our 2026 strategy. So it's definitely going to be a year of more integration.
I don't think you should expect any other big acquisitions,
but you never know the second half of the year
will start maybe looking to be more acquisitive again.
And Brad, with the integration on that topic
and even the larger theme of adoption
of blockchain technology by TradFi
and crypto-focused companies such as Ripple
acquiring TradFi companies, right? It's kind of happening on both sides. Do you see over time
that it won't necessarily be the crypto market and the TradFi market, that you have this
convergence and it's just going to be the market because they're all going to be running on
blockchain rails? Tony, so first of all, I think this is an incredibly important question.
And I'm going to make fun of my age a little bit here. I've been around the technology landscape
for a long time. I moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 in the earliest days of the internet.
And in those early days of the internet, we would call things an internet company.
And Amazon was an internet company. Yahoo was an internet company it's like no no no actually Amazon's just
commerce company Yahoo is just a media company and over time we realized the internet is going
to be pervasive in every company and we're not going to have just internet companies we're going
to have companies that integrate these technologies I believe the exact same thing is true around crypto and blockchain and even you know when i
talk about ripple you'll rarely hear me refer to ripple as a crypto or blockchain company
instead i think about it as we're a infrastructure company almost a platform company around financial
services it happens to be we
leverage crypto and blockchain to deliver those solutions better, cheaper, faster, stronger. But
I don't think in the years ahead, we'll talk about these companies as crypto first. And I think,
frankly, companies who do that are going to miss the bigger opportunity.
Yeah, absolutely. So how is Ripple approaching institutions when it comes to utilizing
the XRP ledger and even the XRP token? And I'll reference, you know, some recent adoption news
like the Biliton diamond tokenization would control alt if I'm not mistaken. But how are you
approaching these institutions? So first of all, you know, I've said this now a few times on Twitter, but I want
to say it here for this community in my own voice. It may not always be obvious. I want every single
person in the XRP family, the XRP army to know that XRP is the North Star for Ripple. It's our purpose. When we think about what we're doing on Ripple payments
or Ripple Prime or Ripple Treasury or custody or RLUSD, this is all focused on how we can drive
utility, trust, and velocity or liquidity around XRP and the XRP ledger. So, you know, things like Ripple payments,
payments on the DEX with permission domains,
Ripple Prime using XRP for collateral and lending,
Ripple Treasury, we kind of talked about, you know, doing enabled payments around XRP and RLUSD
within treasury management.
These are all examples of where we are going to continue
to make sure as we think about Ripple as a platform company for financial infrastructure, that XRP is at the heartbeat of that.
You'll hear more about this, you know, some of those specifics from Monica Long, our president at Ripple, later today.
And, you know, this morning you may have seen we announced Aviva Investors, one of the largest asset management firms in the world tokenizing on the xrp ledger so
we're going to continue to focus on that institutional opportunity you know ripple has
decided to partner when it comes to you know partner or invest or you know support companies
going after the consumer opportunity uh but hopefully it gives a sense of kind of where we
are with that and the occ recently grantedipple conditional approval for a banking license.
What does this enable Ripple to do today and what changes once the conditional provisions are removed?
So I think there, well, I believe aside the longer term big picture opportunity,
what we could do that the charter today, this really allows stability around RLUSD.
Many people know that we originally set up and launched RLUSD under the New York DFS
kind of trust license, Department of Financial Services in New York, which we felt like at the
time was the gold standard. We now have both of these. And it's really, we want to be the most regulated,
compliant, because we're focused on institutional flows. That is the priority. Now, the specifics
around the OCC charter, it allows better bankruptcy protections for reserve assets.
It makes it very clear that RLUSD is a leader under the Genius Act framework,
but it really secures and kind of cements our leading position. And we've seen that
recognized by analysts and reporters alike. But we really are the first stablecoin issuer to have
oversight as a trust company at both the state and federal levels. And we think that dual layer
is the gold standard. So that's think that's that dual layer is the gold
standard. So that's why that's important. Now, there's been a lot of speculation about what we
could do in the future. There's been some commentary about a Fed master account, which
we do think is compelling. And there's things we may do in the future that I'm not going to
go into today. But suffice it to say you know you asked earlier
that if you told me 10 years ago we would have even conditional approval from the occ or kind
of even engagement with the occ like that is you know massive progress uh relative to where we
started this journey yeah absolutely i sometimes have to pinch myself to when I see these news items and, you know, the crypto industry are integrating into the TradFi world and these licenses and all these things being provided.
It's pretty amazing, but shows the potential of this technology and we still have ways to go.
well you've been a a good uh person to i mean as i said in my introduction which i guess was
the audit audits audits the audio wasn't working so well but i mean you've been along this journey
uh for a long time as well and kind of seen a lot of it firsthand so we have appreciated that and
i know a lot of people in the community appreciate that so thank you
yeah my pleasure and a two-part question here how is ripple planning to support the xrp
ecosystem with users developers developers and builders?
And what are your favorite qualities of the XRP community?
Look, I will start by just being a very genuine.
I freaking love this community.
I love this army. And I feel like we're a community when we need to be a community.
When we're an army, we need to be an army based upon kind of everybody who's attacking us.
But the fact that this group has stayed with us through thick and thin and honestly dug into the data and kind of do your own research, dug into where XRP is well positioned and where it makes sense to use something else or it does make sense to use XRP and there's a lot to love about the underlying technology and
I could not be more proud uh to call myself a member of the XRP family I'm really in awe of
the the community in the kind of passion the resilience uh is just awesome and again i i you know kind of lurk on twitter sometimes as you guys
know and it you know seeing people kind of correct and even you know honestly also appropriately
ignoring some people because it's like some people they just they're spreading not they're just
intentionally spreading misinformation i'm just like whatever i'm gonna ignore this person okay
but one of the things i'm probably most excited about, which is, you know, I think the important part of your question here,
I think this year getting more activity and momentum around the lending protocol
and other protocols is moving further. It's a priority for me. It's a priority for Ripple,
but yield generation and whether it's Ripple supporting partners like Flare, Morpho, Uphold, Doppler, Axlar.
But all of these companies are doing things around yield generation on the XRP ledger.
And I think it's critically important to make it more institutional, more friendly to the community.
There are some L1s are kind of ahead of us in this.
And I think 2026, seeing real progress on this is important.
And I'll also just say, part of the reason I'm proud of this community
and frankly proud of Ripple, when we focus on something,
we are really freaking good.
And this is definitely going to be a focus area in 2026.
And you celebrated the launch of the XRP spot ETFs last year, a major on-ramp.
And these have been created for other assets as well, but certainly XRP was one of the most anticipated.
And where do you think the ETF market is going this year?
And what does this signal about the regulated investment products?
I think this is a really important
in terms of making all of crypto more institutional.
And again, as you guys know, I believe in a multi-chain world.
I'm not an XRP maxi.
I think XRP is exceptionally good
at some really big solution frameworks,
but I'm proud of the fact that Bitcoin
had a really successful and powerful ETF launch.
Now, XRP was the fastest spot ETF to hit $1 billion in asset center management since ETH in less than a month. Today, it stands at about $1.5 billion.
Even last week when there was kind of massive carnage going on in the market, there was positive inflows of, I think, $30 or $40 million, which is great.
And some of the big pivots that I wouldn't have expected, Vanguard, as one of the largest asset
managers in the country, in the US, had until recently, I think it was early December,
had been very anti-crypto. And Vanguard finally
is opening up access and retirement accounts. And it shows that public markets are keen to
invest in crypto. And ultimately, these big players like Vanguard need to adopt what their
customers want. And their customers, as demonstrated by the ETFs, not just of XRP, but of Bitcoin as well, customers want it and they need to provide it.
And that's important.
So, Brad, you referenced Vanguard.
It seems that institutions, they must have a crypto or blockchain strategy now.
It would be kind of foolish to not have one.
And years before, they kind of ignored it, but it seems like
everyone needs to have a strategy now. Yeah. I agree. Again, I'll say something I said earlier.
I think we are still in early days. I don't think we've seen massive adoption yet. We're
in an entrepreneurial journey. One of the things you
kind of talked about is going from zero to one, and then one to 100, and then beyond. And I think
2025, we went from zero to one. And that's manifested by ETFs. It's manifested by,
frankly, even the BlackRock. Larry Fink talking about the opportunity around tokenizing assets on blockchains is profound.
It's still very early, but crypto isn't fringe anymore.
It's being absorbed into capital markets, into treasury management, into prime brokerage.
And, you know, I think institutions are no longer just exploring blockchain just for crypto exposure.
It's for settlement efficiency, for cross-border liquidity.
And when you underlay all of that with the improving picture around regulatory clarity,
you add all those different pieces together.
And honestly, Tony, it's a conundrum that you're seeing the crypto markets struggle
over the last three or four months.
I'm incredibly optimistic about what's ahead in 2026.
You know, I look forward to the reality I just talked through catching up with the crypto markets and how crypto assets are priced.
And one of the catalysts that could boost further adoption is the Clarity Act passing.
Do you see that passing this year and what impact may it have?
I mean, Tony, look, I'm an entrepreneur. And so people accuse me of always being optimistic.
And so, you know, I'm guilty as charged. Now, that being said, I have been very close to this.
Ripple has been very close to this. As I mentioned earlier, our chief legal officer was at the White House yesterday.
You saw some coverage about that.
You have this White House pushing hard to get that moving again.
And frankly, I was disappointed and frustrated that it stalled, you know, when the chairman
of the banking committee, Tim Scott, kind of paused, if you will.
I do think it's going to get moving again here shortly.
I think there was some very constructive conversation yesterday at the White House on how to bridge the gap between what some of the banks are feeling and, you know, what the crypto community.
But look, the markup that Senator Scott was going to bring had overwhelming support from the crypto community and support around banking.
And so I think we're going to get it back on track.
I'll give it 75% that by the end of April, this is not just back on track, but very close to getting signed.
Final question here, Brad, as we wrap up, where do you see Ripple in 2030?
Wow, 2030. Well, so first of all, I mean, that's only four years from now. I mean,
that used to feel so far away and now it's pretty close. I think Ripple will continue to grow as a platform company for financial infrastructure
that permeates, you know, brings XRP and the XRP Ledger
into all of our use cases and continues to drive that trust,
that utility and liquidity in XRP.
But, you know, look, the thing I will emphasize,
of course, we want Ripple to be successful within XRP. But you know, look, I the thing I will emphasize, of course, we want Ripple to be
successful within XRP. I want to keep reminding people, Ripple's reason for existence is driving
success around XRP and the XRP ecosystem. We will continue to build products and services that
customers love and will pay for to make Ripple successful, but it's in service of the overall XRP ecosystem
and will champion technology improvements around XRP as we have,
but also champion other use cases and investments
that we think will help achieve that.
So, look, I think there's a chance to –
there will be a trillion dollar crypto company.
I don't doubt that for a second. I think Ripple has the opportunity if we do things well in
partnership with the overall XRP ecosystem to be that company and maybe there'll be more than one.
Exciting times are ahead. Brad, I was told you had an announcement to share about exclusive swag.
Yeah, look, Tony, I mean, this is kind of on the fun side of things. But before we close,
and as I shared via a tweet, a teaser yesterday on Twitter, we're doing the first kind of XRP
community day swag drop. I posted a crew neck that we we're going to be giving away it's got xrp
community day it's a limited edition design only 2 000 were produced it's really our way of saying
thank you for spending the day with us obviously virtually uh but as part of the xrp community
i'm super excited to kick off the first swag drop and you'll see our ripple x dev account
the first swag drop and you'll see our ripple x dev account uh just shared a link in the comments
uh on how to enter to win one uh there'll be a few more drops throughout the event when the website
is live so stay tuned for the next one later in the amea segment and then again for the america
is an apex segment of the event uh but look i'll'll close just by saying, I really appreciate all of you for
being here. We have an exciting day planned. I appreciate everybody who kind of organized and
helped brought it together. But thank you, Tony, for joining me in this kickoff. And so with all
of that, and maybe right on time, despite the audio problems at the beginning, I will hand it
off to Marcus Enfinger, our senior vice President of RippleX for the next session.
Thank you Brad. Hi everyone. Following on from Brad's opening, it feels pretty
clear that the momentum behind the XRP ecosystem has never been stronger. I'm
Markus Infinger, SVP of Ripple, and I spent two decades in global banking prior to Ripple.
And so seeing TradFi giants like the one we're about to discuss
embrace the speed and efficiency of the XRP ledger
is exactly why I'm here.
Look, it's really an incredible time to be having this conversation.
The popularity of tokenized real-world assets, or RWAs,
continues to increase as we've seen billions of financial assets
move on to public chains globally.
I want to highlight here upfront that the XAPL currently
ranks sixth in the total assets league table on RWAs. on our
Thank you. Marcus, I think we lost your audio. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. music so
so Sorry for the technical glitch there and leaving you in the cliffhanger there.
I think I was just going over the hot of the press earlier today that we announced an exciting
new collaboration between Ripple
and Aviva Investors to bring tokenized fund structures onto the XRPL. Against that backdrop,
I'm super excited to be here today with Alistair Sewell, Senior Investment Director at Aviva
Investors, a firm managing over 250 billion pounds in assets. Alistair, it's great to have you.
assets. Alistair, it's great to have you.
To start us off.
Even better to have you.
It's even better to have you back.
Awesome. It's good to hear you.
To start us off, many of us joining here in Europe will know Aviva investors
well, but for those elsewhere who aren't as familiar, could you briefly introduce
yourself and the company?
I'd be delighted to.
And look, I've got to say what a privilege, what an honor it is to be here with you today.
And speaking personally, I can say that I and Aviva Investors are absolutely delighted by this partnership we've entered into with Ripple.
So Aviva Investors is the investment management arm of Aviva PLC, which is the UK's largest diversified insurer.
Ava PLC, which is the UK's largest diversified insurer.
It's a business whose origins stretch back more than 325 years.
And today we serve over 25 million customers across the UK, helping them protect what matters,
save for the future and manage risk in an increasingly complex world.
And when I think back, Marcus, over that history of Ava Investors, that 325 years,
I think we've seen a lot of change in that time.
And one of my favorite historical examples
is our early adoption of the telegraph.
Now, you may remember January 1838,
or maybe you don't remember January 1838,
but that was when the very first telegraph was ever sent.
And Aviva Investors' predecessor firms
were among some of the earliest commercial
users of this technology, using telegraphy to accelerate underwriting claims long before
digital systems existed. And that's really important. That's a reminder that technological
change is not new to our industry and that we've been able to consistently embrace innovations
in the past to make markets faster, safer and more connected.
And that very same mindset drives us today.
We manage over $335 billion, 250 sterling in assets across public and private markets.
And we are always looking for technologies that can help us improve how we serve our clients.
And what we hope to do with you at Ripple is exactly that, a step into the future.
That's awesome and really impressive.
Over 300 years of early adoption and embracing technology.
That's really exciting.
Let's talk about the new collaboration between Aviva Investors and Ripple,
which we were really excited to announce earlier today.
So Alistair, what's happening?
What does it actually mean?
And why is it important?
Why should people in the XRP community care?
Well, there's a very simple reason why people in the XRP community should care,
because this is a great example of how a traditional financial institution
is embracing this new technology, is embracing the XRP ledger
to move our operations into the future.
What that means in specific terms is we are going to be working with Ripple to bring tokenized
mutual fund structures onto the XRP ledger. So these are going to be yield bearing tokens
with highly stable value due to the high quality and the high stability of the assets backing them.
These are a form of a yield bearing token which will essentially bring us as a traditional
investment manager, as a traditional financial institution into the future. And this will enable
for us, this will enable faster settlement, it will enable automated life cycle events,
it will reduce operational frictions and it will improve distribution models. And Marx, I have to say, this is an experimentation for its own state.
We see, we recognize that financial markets are changing,
the way they operate is changing, and we want our products
to be able to integrate seamlessly with the digital ecosystem
we're going to see in the future.
Awesome. Thank you. To double-click a little bit on that,
what problems specifically are you looking to solve by bringing your funds onto the XRPL?
Can you share a little bit more about the use cases and sort of like the envisioned end state of the value created here for your stakeholders?
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to give you another real quick history lesson here, Marcus. And this time the history lesson is the mutual fund. Did you know the mutual fund was invented
in 1924? That's 102 years. So that was 100 years that we've been using mutual funds in our industry.
And look, they're a great product. They serve investors really well. They do great things
for people. They're also 100 years old. I think we can do a little bit better than that i think we can bring that technology forwards what does that
mean in specific terms and in direct answer to your question well it means we can move
settlement cycles for funds from days to seconds it means we can eliminate some of the manual
reconciliation which ultimately cause cost increases in funds. It means we can consolidate data flows into simpler and more accessible patterns.
And also we can address one of the really important things,
which is the limited mobility today of assets for collateral purposes.
Now, I realize collateral is getting a little bit technical in terms of financial market jargon,
and maybe we can unpack that a little bit later.
But this ability to move collateral faster is a real game changer for traditional financial
institutions like Aviva Investors. And that's because we can move from slow settlement to
near instant settlement. We can move to synchronized data. We can move to 24-7 trading
and we can move to moving our assets around in real time. That is tangible utility, that is tangible benefit for investors.
It's really exciting listening to you.
I just recall, hey, this is exactly the kind of reason why I joined this industry
and just this notion of seeing financial markets at large
just operate much more productively.
And so, yeah, it's just exciting this is
not falling into place. Shifting gears a bit here, how easy was it for you to get internal buy-in
for the initiative and do you anticipate any challenges as things move forward? Appreciate
that Veva Invest is a pretty significantly sized company and navigations aren't always super simple, I could imagine.
No, absolutely. And change is hard. And I think we all recognize and we all understand that change is hard.
But we also recognize that change is necessary. Change is necessary to accommodate the future.
And also, frankly, to be very candid here is we recognize the risk of disruption.
We see there is a scenario where financial markets move at scale to a digital basis,
to a digital infrastructure.
And in order to remain relevant, to be able to capture the opportunities that present itself,
it's important that we change.
But look, that change is hard, Marcus.
You're absolutely right.
And I know you've got a history on the traditional financial institution side as well. So enabling that change is difficult, right? And I think the
way that we approach that is number one, Aviva Investors have a long history of innovation. We
have innovated both in the past, I gave the example of Telegraph, but more recently we've
done some really interesting stuff in the carbon removal market, for example. There are interesting
things we focus on and that innovation is part of our lifeblood, part of our desire to change. really interesting stuff in the carbon removal market for example there are interesting things
we focus on and that innovation is part of our lifeblood part of our desire to change
but to make it happen it's about it's about building messaging it's about identifying the
people internally who are willing to bear the torch who are willing to engage with the this
new technology and build momentum build buy--in, and actually make tangible change.
And that doesn't just come from a single individual.
That comes from many individuals from many different functions who come together,
who see the potential, who see the roadblocks, who work to climb over those roadblocks.
I think from a timing perspective, what we see is, as an institution, we see that this
technology is maturing.
And I think Brad used the example in his opening remarks
about the entrepreneurial perspective
and about where we are now.
And I think he's absolutely right.
We're at the point where the technology is maturing.
We're at the point where we're seeing client needs evolve.
We're seeing the point where the direction of travel
the markets is very, very clear.
And so we need to adapt to that.
And by working with Ripple, we hope to do so.
It's not gonna be an easy path forward, so let me,
we're under no illusions here.
We have legacy systems within our business.
We need to interact with those.
We have regulatory issues that we need to address.
We need to work with our regulators
in a constructive and productive manner
to enable these opportunities.
And we need to scale the operational readiness.
These are big ticket items, but we embrace the challenge,
we rise to that challenge, and we can't wait to get our teeth into it.
It is exciting, Markus.
So look, first of all, congrats on getting this initiative so far internally,
rallying the relevant support.
And thank you for being a champion for the technology.
And look, we at Ripple, we've always believed this movement support and thank you for being a champion for the technology.
And look, we at Ripple, we've always believed this movement is a collaborative movement,
is working with the system to transform financial markets.
And so it's important to have partnerships like this, building the relevant bridge, so
to speak.
Shifting gears again a little bit, I know this initiative ultimately envisions the promise line of sort of like enabling on-chain repo. And
just quickly for those less familiar with the term, think of repo as the
essential daily plumbing of Wall Street. So sort of a platform to manage global
financial liquidity needs and the way for institutions to either borrow cash by
using their high-quality assets as collateral or lend cash to earn a secure return.
So Alice...
Marcus, I'm going to continue i think you're you're asking me about what we think about the
on-chain repo market exactly exactly sorry did i did i get lost there for a bit yeah we lost you
for one second but that's fine i was just going to say you did a great job of explaining what a repo
is and i can really only only reiterate just how important repo is it's the lifeblood of financial
markets it's really what drives almost everything that happens in financial markets.
It may not be visible to many people, but it is there and it is very significant.
Did you know that the US repo market alone turns over more than $12 trillion every single day?
That's a 12 with 12 zeros.
12 trillion with a t 12 trillion with a t yeah so when you think about a market that size
Trillion with a T.
12 trillion with a T, yeah.
and if any efficiency gain no matter how small it is that means dollars that means significant
dollars that means that means you can make a real game you can make more efficient so what can you
do with an on-chain repo well you can do near instant settlement and that crosses a huge barrier
is a where it currently today you'll have end-of-day
netting processes for example which means intraday you may have less visibility than you'd like to
on the collateral or the cash that's moving around on either side of that repo transaction
so having near instant settlement giving you that visibility on it means you can automate
margining for example your collateral can move in real time and you have far, far greater transparency. And look, this is a real life issue. This is a real concern for
markets. I know many of the listeners to this are in the US or international, but back right here in
the UK, just three years ago, we had real issues in our government bond market due to some
unfortunate government policy decisions.
And that was a time which just reveals how important it is to know where your collateral is,
to know that you can move it fast, your counterpart if you need to, and you can react swiftly to a crisis event in markets. That's hard with conventional architecture. With a digital
architecture, that becomes much, much easier, and this solves the whole raft of problems. So that's hugely important.
The other interesting thing we can do with moving repo on chain
is we can potentially change the cash leg for a tokenized money market fund.
And that is a potential real game changer
because it cuts out a lot of frictions that you have in the value chain
for creating a repo today.
I realize that's a little bit technical, but just think about it this way.
That repo, which you described so beautifully at the beginning, Marcus,
we can make it work simpler, faster and with greater visibility,
and that delivers tangible benefit, tangible utility
to the entire financial system.
We cannot underestimate how significant the gains are here.
Thank you, Alastair, and to stay too obvious,
very equally excited about the prospect and potential of this use case in particular.
Maybe to just go even a layer deeper here and also looking a little bit further ahead.
As we look into this on-chain future, how do you see the pool of eligible collateral evolving?
I would say we're starting with these high-grade funds, but do you see a world where native
digital assets like XRP or Bitcoins eventually find their way into these institutional-grade
on-chain repo structures, sort of like emerging forms of collateral as they mature further
from here and more regulation like Genius acts and what not fall in place.
What's your viewpoint there?
Yeah, look, there's a lot of regulatory pieces that will need to change to get really mass
adoption of this, particularly outside of the US.
In the US, we've seen great progress on this, but in other markets, there are still some
regulatory blockers, which you get a little bit technical in the characteristics of the
repo market.
I think where we begin is probably with bonds, so high quality government bonds, treasuries and the likes,
or what we have in the UK, we call them gilts, which are the equivalent of US treasuries.
We see it starting there and then probably expanding to other assets.
Because as you know, Marcus, there are two things that really matter in a repo.
Those are the counterparty, so the guy on the other side, the guy or the girl on the other side of the table that you're interacting with, and the collateral that you're moving.
Now, if that collateral is really high quality, then you can come to an agreement where you have a relatively little margin in it.
But as you start moving into other types of assets, then you're going to want a little bit more margin to cover you for any risk that you're getting there.
So effectively, this is risk neutral.
So you're almost indifferent to what the asset is, provided the amount of haircut taking
protects you from the risk of that.
So the implication of that is as technology becomes more widely adopted, as familiarity
increases, as adoption increases, then investors are more than likely to be looking at a wider
collateral set,
provided they're working with a high-quality counterparty that they trust
and the amount of margin that they have is sufficient to cover them for the risk of the assets.
And look, we are moving into a world where we have traditional assets.
We're tokenizing those so they become into a digital format.
digital format. We have digitally native assets, which do include some of the assets you've
We have digitally native assets, which do include some of the assets you've already mentioned.
already mentioned. So I think there is a multi-asset future where many different asset types will
be accepted into these transactions at scale. And as we both agreed earlier on, repo is
a lifeblood of financial markets. This is really where TradFi can meet DeFi in a truly
exciting way.
Thank you so much, Alessair. makes a lot of sense in terms of the haircut
aspects and all that. And yeah, lots of room to grow and mature there for a crypto native asset,
so to speak. I'd like to end the question set with the following. Look, there's been a lot of talk about RWA tokenization for several years now.
Perhaps can you give us your view on what stage you think we're at on the tokenized RWA journey today
and how do you see the future unfolding over the coming years?
Yeah, I mean, one word, growth growth and growth i think you you you referred to earlier
that there's about 360 billion dollars so or so of uh tokenized real world assets now
that's a big number and that's that's a growing number you think about tokenized money market
funds which is one of the areas that's really important to us we see about 10 billion us dollars worth of tokenized money market funds today those actually grew by about 120 last year
marcus that that's a super normal growth rate that that is really a super normal growth rate
and that is because there's tangible demand there's tangible market interest and there's
real world utility for investors who are using these products. So I think we're going to see growth.
And what's underpinning that is that technology is now production-ready.
Regulatory clarity is improving.
And these products, like the tokenized money market funds I've referred to,
they're gaining real traction.
What's going to be important?
I think interoperability is going to be important.
Collateral markets moving on chain are going to drive more growth, more demand.
The evolution of distribution models will be an important factor.
More importantly, really the bottom line
is that tokenization,
tokenization is what we're talking about today.
Tokenization becomes the standard layer
of financial market infrastructure.
And that's where entities like Ripple
have advantages and can execute on this.
And this is where the XRP Ledger can provide that layer that we as an institution,
financial institution, can transact on and provide services to our clients.
Thank you, Alistair. Direction is certainly up and to the right. And look, just thank you, Alistair, for joining us here at the XRP Community Day.
I'm sharing your thoughts and insights, and it goes without saying,
we very much look forward to continuing our collaboration with you
as the XRPL and XRP lead the charge in bringing TradFi assets on-chain
and Unlock utility into the wider financial system.
Wish everyone a good rest of the community day and stay tuned for the next session on funding
in the XRP ecosystem which is now due. Thank you all and be safe out there.
Thank you all, and be safe out there. Thank you. Thank you. I can't burn, dog.
I miss you like a long fucking head. I Oh Thank you. Oh Oh Thank you. All right. Hi, everyone. Let's get started. It was a great hearing about on-chain repols
and institutions. I want to shift gears a little bit here and talk about startups and VCs.
I'm Christina and I lead the ecosystem growth team here at Ripple.
And a lot of what I focus on, or at least what our team focuses on, is growing startups,
supporting startups in the ecosystem, working with builders, but also connecting to different
VCs and bringing them
into the ecosystem. And that's been sort of a big topic that we, that I hear in a reoccurring theme
is like, hey, you know, all these entrepreneurs, like any entrepreneurs out there, whether in the
blockchain or not, is they're always looking for funding, which is exactly what we're going to
dive into in this session. Joining me here, we have three VCs, Rob from Dragonfly, Alex from
Reforge, and we have Jacob all the way here from Singapore at Superscripts. Welcome to the panel.
Good morning, good evening, wherever you are, Rob, Alex, and Jacob.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah. Excited to dive right in.
So maybe just to start off, you know, really, really broadly, you know, how would you describe the current capital, the current funding environment right now?
Like, where is capital flowing?
And what's changed compared to a year or two years ago?
Maybe, Alex, we can start with you.
Yeah, sure. So I think so. Hi, everyone. Alex from Reforge here. I think we're starting to see
somewhat of consolidation happening. I think there's still a lot of capital out there. But
the expectations of what that capital is used for and the short
termism that has plagued the industry for a long time with respect to quick exit liquidity
playing the game of investing and expecting a token return well before companies achieve
some level of success with product market fit and whatnot
is making most people jaded.
I think retail in particular
looks at VC funding and says, hey, we are their exit liquidity. And I think now in 2026, that sentiment has reached this inflection point of we're not going to have it
and we're not going to deal with that anymore.
And that also has resulted in a lot of funding and capital allocators to to to realize, hey, because this playbook doesn't exist anymore.
Maybe we can't either.
So I think money is getting smarter.
That also raises the bar for an expectations for the quality of teams and founders building within the space, which I think is net positive, of course. And then with the introduction of institutions and obviously
with the Trump administration really promoting that from the US, I think both from a regulatory
perspective, but also more generally from a cultural perspective, I think that there's going to be continued net
inflows that will continue boosting the space. But particularly on the early stage, in terms of what
I'm seeing, I think, very excited for a continued allocation, but just in higher quality, less
grifty opportunities.
Yeah, that's actually pretty interesting, you know, jaded on token launches. I'm curious, like, is it? Is it? You have a
hybrid when it comes to seeing a lot of hybrid when it fundraise
or just mostly people just on the equity side and not taking
tokens anymore from a VC perspective?
Yeah, I can quickly answer and then maybe if Rob and Jacob have
a perspective, but we're still seeing a hybrid structure with equity and a token warrant with the early stage, I guess, structure of contracts and investments.
But there's less emphasis on this expectation that there will be a
token just purely because they are a crypto native company.
Katie Robbert- Got it. Got it. Okay, and stronger founders
definitely. Rob, what's your take of what's going on in the
market? You know?
Robby Barbaro- Yeah, I think we're seeing something a little
bit different than what Alex has seen. But that also might just
be a little bit of a stage point. So we had this discussion with a number of different VCs the last couple of months.
And frankly, the VC market is actually pretty active right now.
If you look at the amount of capital that was announced, deployed in January, it was actually quite strong.
But it's really coalesced around not just, okay, well, use cases, use cases that work, but, you know, the kind of use cases that are showing really, really strong product market fit, but it's also really coalesced around equity.
So most of the VC capital right now is going into equity businesses.
I think that's somewhat structural for the reasons of the fact that, like, you know, stable coins and payments is one of the hottest topics.
Organization is one of the hottest topics.
The things like, you know, continuing to have centralized exchanges and market structure and, you know, call it some core infrastructure for like institutional adoption.
Those continue to be one of the most actively funded parts of the market.
Prediction markets is probably the one other.
These are, you know, by definition,
mostly, you know, kind of like traditional equity investments or private equity.
We, DeFi continues to still do well,
especially around derivatives, perpetuals, et cetera,
because we're, the fact that, you know,
we're also seeing real clear product market fit there. I think across some of the more that, you know, we're also seeing real clear product market fit there.
I think across some of the more decentralized, you know, call it tokenization platforms,
there's some interest there as well. So things that will likely have tokens. But
I think what we're also seeing is that, you know, when the market is as weak as it is right now,
we're seeing the repricing of a lot of these, you know, alt tokens as aggressively and as quickly as what's happening now, people don't want to,
you know, take the risk of not understanding what the market will support, right? And so
for a long period of time, you know, when there was, you know, called seed or series A investing
in token projects, you know, most of what would happen in the VC landscape
would say, okay, well,
I think there's some fundamental value here,
but I also think on a relative basis
to where the market is pricing,
similar types of projects
and what we think the addressable market is,
this is the type of valuation that I can give this token.
That's just completely upending itself at a time
when we've had a lot
of tokens that over the last three, four months are down 70, 80%, right?
And so you have to be much more thoughtful around, you know, what that valuation is,
how much money you're going to raise, how much solution you're going to take, and what
the tokenomics are ultimately going to be.
And so I think Alex's point coalescing around the, you know, sort of these main themes with PMF, but I think we're also seeing quite a bit of focus on, you know, the financial use cases and the traditional equity or private equity tech businesses.
Great. Thanks, Rob. Jacob, what are you seeing in the market right now, especially being in APAC?
Yes. So I think a lot of what I'm seeing in the market is somewhat similar to what Alex and Rob
are seeing. I'll try and provide a slightly different perspective. So given that there is
a little bit more pessimism around the performance of altcoins and tokens, and coupled with the fact
that we're seeing a little bit more regulation that's friendly in the US with regards to
stablecoins and things with product market fit.
We're actually seeing a trend back towards more fundamentals.
So metrics that people can measure, whether it's volume, growth, users, revenue generation,
and hopefully cash flows back to the business or protocol.
And what that essentially means is that people, those things tend to flow back to the business or protocol. And what that essentially means is that people,
those things tend to flow back to equity
as opposed to necessarily tokens.
And people do that generally in bear markets
or at the start of bear markets
because they're not necessarily driven by hype.
They're not driven by a narrative.
They're not driven by throwing capital at things
that are very hot in the market at the moment.
So I think given the stage that we're in the market, given the fact that we also have somewhat regulatory support for seeing better standards, there is actually more things that people can point towards in terms of numbers that they can peg value to.
And so at least on the VC side, what we're seeing is that there is a bit more
focus on fundamentals, maybe more toward equity, and that aligns more with traditional fintech
investing. That said, while altcoins and tokens are having a little bit of a negative moment,
they still provide something that's quite differentiated necessarily to equity. You
know, when you talk about tokens, you're talking about communities, about products
that stale on the internet, where people have a lot of belief, where you can really
incentivize them with tokens.
And they are currently high risk at the moment.
So perhaps venture a little bit scared to tip into those.
But ultimately, they still give you the reflexive 10, 20, 100 extra turns that venture is looking for.
So ultimately, that's where we kind of see where the market is now.
But of course, when the market's not looking at things like tokens,
that's when you want to have a look at the teams that are really building that
because those could be the next unicorns in the next two or three years
where the market sort of starts to head back in a positive direction. really building that because those could be the next unicorns in the next two or three years where
the market sort of starts to head back in a positive direction. Yeah, that's so interesting.
I mean, a lot of the early products that came out or dApps that came out of just crypto in general
was all, you know, bootstrapped with tokens. So it'd be interesting to see where we go in the next couple of years as we try to focus on more
and more quality entrepreneurs. Maybe just to dive in a little bit more, Rob, I know
you wrote, there was an article where you wrote stablecoins and the collapse of the
legacy payment model. I'd love to dive into just stablecoins a little bit more uh you know we launched rlusd
see like where where you think it fits in terms of our legacy ecosystem but also the broader payment ecosystem in your mind maybe rob we can start with you yeah so i think it's really interesting
about seeing how ripple has attacked the stable coin space has been that it's really interesting about seeing how Ripple has attacked the stablecoin space has been that it's really been about bootstrapping, you know, qualities of Ripple R2 use cases, primarily through a lot of their acquisition, right, which I've considered quite smart. have sort of this war chest that they built up over many years and this reputation.
And you've had what has been sort of a duopoly in the stablecoin space with Circle and with Tether being the vast majority of the general purpose stablecoin outstanding.
And then you have like PYUSD and a little bit of these Paxos coins and ROUSD now kind of bringing up the rear. I think ROUSD is roughly one and a half billion now.
And of the kind of the core group. And what has been a struggle for a lot of different people
who are, you know, call it, you know, launching general purpose stable coins today, US dollar stable coins,
but without, and trying to eat into, call it that duopoly of Tether and Circle, as to how do we go
and convince people to use this without all the deep liquidity, the deep on-ramp, off-ramp
connectivity, the global acceptance that, you know, these others have built over, you know,
Tether's been around since 2014,
and the USDC has been around since 2018.
And so I really enjoyed seeing the,
they had road acquisition,
I was on the board there and it was close to them,
and really if they can be used as trading collateral
with what is the second biggest prime broker in the space.
What's happened since then with acquisitions of rail
on the payment orchestration side
and on the treasury management acquisition
that Ripple made as well.
And getting these kind of legacy businesses
and improving the technological backend
and the software and the infrastructure
to be able to put stable coins in them
and making those businesses more efficient
is gonna be a big part of how I think we take that next wave of stable coin adoption.
And so I'm super excited about, you know, how Ripple has been really approaching that.
And so I see it being a bit of a, call it a flywheel or a snowball where, you know,
as those traditional businesses can start, you know, getting the usage and issuance going that, you know, liquidity begets liquidity and usage begets usage.
Now you can start to get more broadly accepted.
frankly that the you know the days of doing what we're seeing some others do which is oh we just
pay a bunch of incentives to a bunch of d5 protocols in hopes that they will you know
hold our stable coins like those are going away and those don't have nearly as high of roi on
what is kind of the next wave of fintech and stable coin adoption so um so that's what we're
seeing so far on the Ripple side.
I think it's still very, very early days.
Stablecoin issuance has actually stalled a little bit
the last few months.
I don't actually think that's surprising.
I think a lot of people do,
but this is digitally native internet money
that moves at the speed of light.
Because the velocity of money can be so much higher,
you don't actually need the same amount of supply
as you would in something like an actual pay-per-dollar.
And so I'm very excited about what's happening.
I think 2026 is gonna be the year
where a lot of these proof of concepts
become actual kind of real-world adoption
for a much broader set of users.
Yeah, that's actually really interesting.
I think fast forward maybe five years ago, I wonder if we'll still be using the term
stablecoins as it becomes sort of invisible to the end users, especially if they're getting
or obfuscated for the users as stable payments get paid to end users.
Maybe, you know, a lot of startups coming in, especially when they build on XRP Ledger
and where they have stable coins flowing to XRP Ledger, they ask us for all USD.
I'm kind of curious from like a VC lens, which I think is kind of unique to XRP ecosystem,
is that there is to XRP ecosystem is that there is
also XRP. I'm kind of curious how you from the VC's lens see these two assets coexisting
together and what are sort of the opportunities there?
Yeah.
Maybe. Oh, go ahead.
No, go ahead. Sorry.
Alex, Rob, or Jacob, any of you want to take that?
Yeah, I'll let one of the other guys take it.
Yeah, so I think that's a really interesting question.
And I think it's really very dependent on some of the things that Rob was saying,
which is as issuance slows down, I think the real
opportunity momentum goes towards stable coins being more of a wedge. And then you kind of see
everything else getting pulled in behind it, right? So payments and treasury are typically
the easiest to explain to enterprises and incumbent institutions with RWAs and collateral being a close second because
all of that stuff maps to existing mental models. And when you couple that with the rest of the
stack that Ripple has built out through the acquisitions that Rob was highlighting, I think
that it becomes a really powerful flywheel. And I think that also is a testament to the strategy, I think,
looking forward of what Ripple is doing really well, which is on one end, we're making XRP the
institutional asset. And that becomes incredibly powerful as kind of a key driver but then at the same time this idea of scaling rl usd through usage and
holding um through a bifurcated strategy kind of locks that in place so the bifurcated strategy as
far as i'm concerned is this hey let's take big swings with partnerships of every major company
that we're familiar with on the retail side and institutional side, right from your Walmart's of the world to your consumer products across the across the landscape to then further
down the stack, which is the developer evangelism. And I think when you have kind of this, hey,
we're going to have stable coins as a wedge in which stable coin distribution, it's not just
like our, our legacy is not just another another stablecoin but it matters where it lives right
is it living within payments is it in payroll is it with remittances is it with commerce rails
um is it with integration points like other ERPs uh I think that that scales really well when you
think about distribution clarity it's like where are the real channels that can put product in
front of institutions and enterprises and again that is where XRP then comes in really strategically.
And then lastly, I would say is the regular, the regulatory advantage
really has to be utilized.
I think RLUSD is being positioned as, hey, we paid the regulatory price at Ripple.
And so now we want to wedge into traditional financial institutions
and brokers, as well as these
enterprises that I mentioned.
And I think that that will compress a lot of the go to market friction further down
to developers.
So I think that I think it's kind of this this this really kind of sharp point by combining both XRP and RLUSD to essentially pave the
wave for not just institutional adoption, but then obviously all of kind of the use
cases underneath it that will pull it along.
Yeah, I think that's really interesting, especially I just noticed that you were
talking about developer evangelist evangelism.
You know, a lot of what I hear in the past is like, hey, there's
not a lot of activity on XRP Ledger or it's a ghost chain. But I think that narrative is
definitely changing. And so I'm curious, like what, you know, the audience here, Alex, Robb or
Jacob, what made you curious and why are you paying to XRP ecosystem right now?
What made you curious and why are you paying to XRP ecosystem right now?
Maybe I'll say a couple of things and my response will also somewhat respond to the last question, right?
So RLUSD, when you look at how enterprises and people like to spend, consistency and understanding the base currency is important.
So people are very familiar with the USD.
It doesn't really fluctuate all that much relative to, let's say, a crypto asset.
And so businesses will want to make payments in a USD-denominated currency.
A stable coin like RLUSD is really great for that.
The XRP asset, on the other hand, is to me, at least the concentration of value accrual to the
Ripple ecosystem. The fact that Ripple has been around for many years, that it has made very smart
acquisitions, whether it's custody, whether it's brokerage and getting liquidity through
Hidden Road, whether it's stablecoin and payment companies,
they've used the treasury to be very smart and strategic.
I think, Rob, you had mentioned this before,
but they've been very smart about acquisitions.
And what attracts us to that is the fact that
if enterprises, companies, institutions
want to actually use blockchain rails to facilitate payments.
They are going to need a whole set of infrastructure that is not just blockchain infrastructure,
that can do a whole lot of other off-chain stuff, that enables them to put currency on
chain, that enables them to have liquidity to be able to swap things, that enables them
to have stable coin rails. And to me, that's
what Ripple relative to other blockchains has done pretty well. They've been very strategic
with the acquisitions. They've effectively enabled institutions and businesses to do
business on the chain. And all of this is important because the ease of doing business
is really key to onboarding things.
If you look at all the payments historically that have happened on the internet, it's all been relatively seamless because blockchains have always been difficult and difficult, hard to use, right?
Whether you're a user or whether you're a business. So the fact that Ripple has sort of been very strategic about these things,
I think has been of interest to me at least.
Yeah, I think that's really interesting because the trend that we're seeing is as these startups
come in and build on XRP Ledger, by and large, they are asking for other Ripple products and it's becoming
the space, especially if one of the institutions are building a financial product where you
can access blockchain itself, but also some of the other products that can serve the needs
of your business.
Maybe just zooming in a little bit more on XRP, I know you talked to, everyone's talked about tokenization,
payments being strong use cases,
you know, in the, just looking ahead
in the next maybe one year, two year,
what are some of the use cases that you want to see
out of the XRP ecosystem that maybe you're not seeing now?
Or where do you think, you know,
the XRP ecosystem should double down on in terms of use cases?
Maybe, Rob, I saw you go on mute.
Yeah, sure, happy to take it.
Listen, I'm probably a little bit different
than the other two guys.
We tend to write checks a little bit later stage.
And where we've been really focused has been on the things that we think blockchains are really good at.
And this is inclusive of XRP and XRPL.
But it's also, I think, just more broadly true that blockchains are good ledger systems.
They're good at moving value and money and information.
And so we're really focused on financial use cases
and we continue to be, we have been and we continue to be.
And so getting a really robust liquidity ecosystem
that will allow for a broad set of trading
different types of tokenized assets on chain,
that is really important.
Like you need stable coins,
stable coins for payments are really important.
The stable coins are in many ways,
the oil for what can be an on-chain economy
that will be inclusive of these like vault products, right?
So for instance, I gave a speech at a leadership offsite
at one of the largest asset managers in the world
about a month ago.
And the entire conversation was around that asset manager getting closer to their end user,
the end buyer of their product,
and doing so in a way through personalization of asset management strategies in on-chain faults.
And this is the management of one of the largest companies in the world.
But to be able to do that, you can't build that first management of uh you know one of the largest companies in the world right and yeah but you
to be able to do that you can't build that first without building the broader ecosystem that
supports tokenization that supports the liquidity uh profiling needed to swap in and out of different
types of assets without building the um you know potentially the insurance contracts that need to
be there without building uh this like broad ecosystem that gets everybody comfortable with putting things on XRPL or on chain. And so where I'm
really focused and where we love to see startups is continuing to focus on payments, continuing to
focus on DeFi, continuing to focus on tokenization, all the infrastructure that goes into that,
tokenization, all the infrastructure that goes into that, and then ways of which to bring much
broader levels of assets or types of assets and much deeper liquidity for all those assets on
chain. I love that deeper liquidity, more assets. Alex, go ahead. I see. Yeah. So similarly, I think
finance is a big focus for us, if not the only focus at the moment. Really, kind of everything that's happening in the world today, there is a re-architecting of the existing financial system as we know it.
Obviously, with the introduction of digital assets for the last decade plus to AI.
And so everything kind of needs to have that, has to go through this evolution.
And our goal is to support companies
that are a part of that change. It's practically in the name of our firm, Reforge. So more
specifically, when we think about kind of what the institutional financial infrastructure
would look like to be a bit more adjacent to digital assets, for example, obviously,
stablecoins is a core pillar to that. But more specifically, right, I think payments and I think payments is very different from settlement.
And I think a lot of times people use those two words synonymously where we're paying, you know, payments is very is effectively peer to peer, right?
Transferring value from one party to another settlement is effectively when the obligation is legally and irrevocably satisfied.
Another settlement is effectively when the obligation is legally and irrevocably satisfied.
And so when we think about settlement, like I think stable coins goes well beyond just
payments and goes into this kind of underlying infrastructure and plumbing associated to
everything being settled and at scale, right?
In a permissionless, trustless way.
And that becomes incredibly powerful when we start thinking about other markets such
as trade finance, right?
Where there is no payment. Everything is open account credit where you have 60-day payback periods,
right? And if you can turn 60 days into seconds or minutes of payback, you effectively create
this amazing permissionless capital markets that have so much more design space than what we
are familiar with. So that's what I would really urge kind of people to think about is on the
surface, you have kind of obviously the existing structure as we know it, but knowing the
limitations that we can now overcome with that from, you know, the yield and the vaults that
Rob mentioned to just fundamentally re-architecting how liquidity flows,
I think we're still in the early days.
So excited to see where that goes.
Definitely in the early days,
especially I know you talked about settlement and AI
with X-Fore 2 out and X-Fore 2 as a standard
allowing different blockchains to settle.
I'm just kind of curious,
maybe this question is more for Jacob.
I know APAC is emerging as the fastest growing region for on-chain crypto activity,
at least in 2005 compared to 2024.
I think I was reading this chain analysis report.
What's your observation of settlement, especially in the AI space and in the APAC region right
now? I think that, you know, AI space and in the APAC region right now?
I think that, you know, AI is a very hot topic right now.
It touches so many things, but it's so pervasive in everything we do.
Probably half, if not 70% of the folks on this space probably use ChatGPT or a competitor to actually enhance what they do.
You know, you ask them questions
and they basically help improve your workflows over time. How does it dovetail with crypto?
That's a big question, right? A lot of projects that to date have come out to say they are crypto
AI projects generally tend to be hype driven. The fundamentals don't make a lot of sense because
it's too early and it's really difficult
for us to assess as well. We have to do it because they could have potentially, you know,
reflexive kind of outcomes. But crypto AI at the moment is a very speculative space.
One of the sub areas within crypto AI, of course, is agents, right? If you click into a travel
website and a chatbot appears at the bottom, you want to ask it, hey, you know, is agents, right? If you click into a travel website and a chatbot appears
at the bottom, you want to ask it, hey, how do I travel? How do I get the cheapest ticket
to the Bahamas or to the US or halfway across the world? And you're expecting a response
from that. Well, what happens if that chatbot then has more context into the preferences that you like,
whether you like to travel economy or business, whether you want to do one stops or two stops,
and then it also has access to your wallets or your bank accounts and is able to then book
that travel and that trip for you. Now, the problem with that aspect of AI agents is that they can't have a bank account
right now. No bank is going to underwrite code effectively having access to your bank account
and your numbers because you could probably sue them. And there's probably a good case to say
that that wasn't you. So the alternative is using either blockchain wallets, blockchain rails,
to be able to facilitate those payments.
So what we're seeing is a lot of teams trying to build in that space
using payment rails, using blockchains that are tuned for payments,
fast, low-cost payments, to be able to empower AI agents
and code to effectively transact on your behalf.
And so I think what's kind of interesting in that space
is a few things.
Firstly, blockchains are very tuned into payments,
so meaning low transaction costs, very fast transactions.
And then secondly, also have a really good level of security,
whether it's talking about the fact that, you know,
there's somewhat limited Spark contract capability.
There's no such thing as MEV,
which exists in, you know, blockchains like Ethereum and Solana.
You want to keep it as simple as possible
because if code is going to simply use a blockchain to transact
and send money on your behalf,
you want to minimize any friction.
You want to minimize any security threats. And so I really think that where there's at least
an area of potential product market fit at the intersection of crypto and AI really is on the
payment rail side and powering AI agents because they have no alternatives at the moment to settle
value. That's really interesting, Jacob. I think the general takeaway from that is it's like play, right?
You want to keep playing around with the idea and see if it hits.
And that's what we want to encourage all the builders in the ecosystem.
Like, hey, you have an idea.
Keep playing around with it.
We have Alex, Rob, and Jacob here kind of giving you a lens of what's going on in the
market now and also in the next year or two. Really excited to again, Jacob, Alex, Rob, thank you so much for your time and giving
dropping some knowledge for the community. And with that, I will hand it over to the
next section on growth of regulated XRP investment products.
Thanks for having us everyone.
Thank you. Thank you.
Awesome.
What a great session that was.
XRP family, permissionless capital markets, RWA, stable coins, XRP, startups, venture capital.
Wow. What a day it's been so far i'm very excited
about the next session and just we'll get started very shortly Thank you. Thank you. . Oh Thank you. Thank you. all right good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you are listening in from
Good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are listening in from.
I'm super excited about this next session.
In 2025, there were well over 40 crypto ETFs and ETPs that were launched.
XRP itself was the fastest spot ETF Thank you. If you could do a quick intro as we get kicked off.
Ray, you're up first.
Hi, everyone.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm Ray.
You might see my Twitter handle, RayScale.
I lead product and research at Grayscale.
I've been here at Grayscale and in the space since 2018, and I'm lucky enough to have gotten
to build this company from about five humans to what it is today. And most importantly,
I have been long XRP since 2017. Awesome. Over to you, Matt.
Awesome. Happy to be here. Matt Hogan. I'm the Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise.
Bitwise is a global crypto asset manager. Very excited to have an XRP ETF out there under the
ticker XRP. I've been here since 2018 as well. And before Bitwise, I spent 10 years in the ETF industry, including as CEO of ETF.com.
So the intersection of crypto and ETFs is the intersection of my career.
Amazing.
And last but not least, Mike, do you want to go next?
Hey, everybody.
Thanks for having me here.
My name is Michael Dunn.
I'm the president of Binomial Exchange and Clearinghouse. We are a US regulated commodities derivative exchange.
I have been around probably in the business since late 2016, so I've been around the block for quite
some time now. And prior to that, I was a high frequency market maker in the various global
commodities exchanges in the world. We specialize in digital asset commodity derivatives.
That's we're talking, you know, Bitcoin, XRP, ETH, futures, perpetuals and options.
And we're the only exchange in the United States right now that allows for crypto assets
to be used as margin collateral.
Amazing.
Let's dive right in into the meat of it.
So what do you guys think are the broader macro drivers
moving markets today? How would you compare this cycle in the context of other cycles
and regulated crypto investment products? Matt, why don't you kick us off here?
Great. Yeah, nice big picture question. Look, I think we're broadly in a classic crypto winter.
I think the four-year cycle is entrenched and people selling ahead of that four-year cycle have contributed to the downturn.
If I think about the slight differences, which I think are instructive between this crypto winter and prior crypto winters,
the biggest one is we're not in a rate-increasing environment like we were in 2022 and 2018. In fact, I think
we're going to be in a pretty aggressive rate reduction environment, despite sort of a narrowing
of those expectations today. And I think that will mean in part that this winter will be
a little bit shower and a little bit shorter than prior winters. I think the broad macro economy is
doing pretty well. I think there broad macro economy is doing pretty well.
I think there's a general global reflation with strong growth in monetary liquidity in places like
China, Japan, and other regions. And I think that'll provide some cushion as well. So a sort
of classic crypto winner, but actually with pretty good macro underpinnings, which I think means
we're closer to the bottom than the beginning.
Awesome. Mike, do you want to go next?
Yeah, I think, as you guys know, I've kind of been in the business for a long time here,
and I've seen a lot of crypto winners and, you know, kind of the boom and bust cycles that we've
seen. And the way that we view it here, Binomial, is more of a kind of a risk management aspect,
right?
Prices go up, prices go down.
But how they do that and what people are doing to manage those risks, I think, is the biggest important key indicator here.
I think from macro level, on a regulatory standpoint, we've seen more clarity with this administration going forward in the United States.
I think that has been a huge tailwind for the crypto industry.
So I'm excited to see that even in these temporary price dislocations. But honestly, too, the growth in inflows and open interest and volume on exchanges in the United States has only gone up.
And I think that's a really exciting development that I think holds to the strength of the crypto and digital asset industry. I think the key difference that I'm seeing is that we're seeing
a migration of, you know, both institutional and retail participants moving to regulated exchange
venues and investment products. And I think that's a really great thing. I think when we worry about,
you know, big market downturns, a lot of people have this idea of, well, what's my price risk?
And then what's my platform risk?
And what we like to see is we don't want people to worry about platform risk, which is, hey, if I have my funds or I'm doing trading on this exchange, is it going to go down?
You know, for example, a lot of offshore exchanges have had this problem.
So I think there are some questions out there about that still that are happening offshore.
But what we're seeing is we're seeing more of that come in the U.S. regulated markets
so that we can handle this volatility, we can handle this price movement,
but people don't have to worry about, you know, catastrophic losses from either funds being lost
or maybe their trades get unwound without them knowing.
Awesome. Andri, do you want to jump in?
I do. Look, I agree with all that. Zooming out, Bitcoin has various economic exposure
characteristics, and that's what makes it appealing as an investment asset. So over time,
it's a store of value. It also has tech exposure, because when we zoom out, at the end of the day,
it's computer networks. And so for the last year or so, we have seen price action more tightly correlated with
tech stocks.
There are some challenges that the crypto asset class faces, maybe around clarity and
worries about quantum readiness.
From our perspective, the fact that Bitcoin has moved in lockstep with software stocks
during this latest sell-off really suggests that the drawdown has
a lot more to do with just broad de-risking of growth-oriented portfolios rather than anything
that's unique to crypto. And that is a story we've seen play out time and time again. You know,
as Matt said, people are watching technicals for what may be the bottom. We are obviously constructive over the longer term.
And when we feel that Bitcoin succeeds,
its price return characteristics
may eventually look more like gold than growth stocks
with lower volatility,
lower correlation to equity markets
and lower expected returns.
But it's early yet.
And ultimately, we've been doing this a long time
and we're not scared of a little
vol. I love that. No one's no one's scared of a little vol. Everyone's seen a few cycles now.
I think it's good to see that the macro environment is different. Infrastructure continues to improve
where we're talking about the length of cycles probably condensing over here.
I think just taking us a little forward,
what are you seeing today in terms of genetic trends
in the space, whether it's US or EU,
or compared to Asia,
particularly around regulated products,
and where do you see the market being most robust for XRP?
Happy for anyone to jump in and take the question.
Yeah, I can kick it off. So, you know, the last year has been really important in the U.S. It's
been paradigm shifting. We had the approval of the generic listing standards, which ushered in the
era of altcoin ETPs in the U.S. And that's what allowed us to launch the XRP ETF.
And so now we have a framework for the criteria around what tokens can become ETPs today.
And that's been very meaningful.
Yeah, and I would just add on the global network or nature, it is global, right?
So we have ETFs in the US and Europe.
We're seeing very strong growth in both of those regions.
I think APAC is moving in positive directions on of this idea of regulated products opening up the institutional investment community to crypto is happening on a global basis.
And also that it takes a long period of time.
You know, coming from my ETF background, ETFs tend to scale not over one or two years, but over three, five, and ten.
And I think that's going to be the case here in crypto as well.
You even take something, you know, we were so excited about the ETF approvals that started two years ago.
But even Bitcoin ETFs were only recently approved on wire house platforms.
And we're moving forward to get other assets approved there as well.
So this is a long-term trend.
It is happening globally.
I think the U.S. is probably the leader, but Europe is robust as well.
And there are portions of Asia on the regulated product side that are coming along as well,
although there's more derivative and offshore activity there on a relative basis than other regions.
And I would just jump back in to build on that. I think to Matt's point, XRP is really, it is a
global asset. You know, when we look, we estimate that about only about 15% of secondary trading
volume last year occurred on U.S. exchanges, and a third of that volume was on Binance and
exchanges all over the world. So, you know xrp is actually very global
yeah i agree with that and i think what's interesting about the kind of the global marketplace
that i was talking about earlier is that you know there's a lot of demand for um you know
offshore trading moving onshore in the united states um the reason of, well, access, liquidity,
and kind of the robust regulatory standards that we have here.
And I think, you know, what's interesting about the commodities derivatives exchange
portion of this is that in the United States, it's actually illegal for U.S. citizens to
go and trade derivatives offshore unless they're registered as a foreign board of trade.
But it's very common for those throughout the world to trade on us exchanges and i think
that's what's an interesting development we've seen is that we've seen a lot of international
sort of come to the united states because they are worried about the platform risk offshore
and i think it's since we're dealing with you know global commodities now ultimately that you
know people want to kind of custody their assets here they want to invest in products here because
they want that regulatory clarity and that certainty that you know the us markets provide and ultimately binomial is a big
part of um you know ray you highlighted the kind of the general listing standards that that came
out which has been a huge improvement um obviously with the ad hoc basis of kind of going one by one
and i'd happy to say that binomial has been a big part of that and i think uh you know we were the
first to list the xrp futures and so hopefully you know both Grayscale and Bitwise use that listing date as a part of getting that over
the line but we're going to continue to do that with you know future products and kind of happy
to be a big part of that movement. Amazing I guess zooming out and just capturing some of the key
themes there, crypto markets generally traded globally we've seen with various jurisdictions adopting crypto uh the access geographically has
increased over time uh with the likes of new investment products whether it's uh derivatives
whether it's uh whether it's different types of investment products like etfs and etps access
keeps improving over a period of time. I'm wondering what you
guys think about the likes of Vanguard opening up retirement accounts as a form of access to allow
crypto ETFs. Do you think that brings in a new wave of passive investment? Do you see that growing?
Do you still see some challenges? How do you guys view that space and access?
Yeah, sure.
I'll jump in here.
I mean, all of that is inevitable. I think the right way to think of institutional crypto adoption or its expansion from traditional retail base to a broader segment of the population is a series of successive waves.
Retirement accounts are one of those waves.
We're still extremely early in that.
I don't even think we've begun to feel the impact of that.
But over time, I think crypto will have a role in essentially all portfolios.
And the persistent bid that you get from retirement accounts will be a major driver.
It will drive down volatility and it will increase price over time.
So that's going to happen.
It is many years in the future, but there are all these successive waves, right? There is the
financial advisor wave. There is the broker-dealer wave. There is the endowment wave. There is the
sovereign wealth fund wave. There is the central bank wave. There is the retirement wave. These
are all moving on their own time schedules, but they're all additive. And importantly for the people on this call, they're all starting effectively at
zero, right? So there's only upside in terms of the growth of crypto and retirement accounts.
And I think that's the way to conceive of it is like a series of successive waves that are
slowly building over time. I agree. I think that, you know, as Matt said, the opportunity is massive.
You know, we're basically at zero right now. There's, I think, what, less than 0.5% of U.S.
wealth assets are allocated to crypto, and that includes ETFs and DATs. I think the opportunity
is massive as it relates to retirement and tax-aged accounts because they are very structurally aligned
with the return characteristics of crypto.
You have a long time horizon,
meaningfully appreciated assets.
And now we live in a world where crypto is income producing.
So investing in crypto products in an IRA
is to me a no brainer.
And I can tell you that I own a lot of my crypto assets in a tax-advantaged way.
Yeah, I think that's really exciting and it's a very exciting development.
Even though we're on the commodity side here, I think that having open access and easier
access is beneficial for everybody.
The way that we look at it is that
is mostly around the interplay of kind of the spot ETF side and their ability to be traded
in brokerage accounts versus the kind of the raw commodity side that we support and kind of how they
play with the interact with each other. I think that's really important. I think maybe every
mom and pop doesn't
quite understand exactly when they go to execute and buy an ETF where that liquidity is coming from,
but ultimately they want to get a good price and they want to be able to not pay a lot to do it.
And I think that's a really important part here. And being able to bridge the kind of ETF world
with the commodity world that we have on our side of things helps price discovery build liquidity
and ultimately trust in the system that people can kind of get in and out
as they see fit, but ultimately just grow liquidity overall. Amazing. Riding waves,
creating ripples, I guess just shifting gears a little bit. Since launching in mid-November
last year, U.S. bought XRP etfs have surpassed 1.2 billion in
assets with consistent net inflows even during broader market pullbacks uh ray and matt do you
think uh since you've launched last year like what has changed uh in terms of xrp uh how have you seen
flows come in on your XRP spot ETFs?
What is some of the thinking there when it came to launching XRP products?
So for us, you know, XRP is a longstanding, structurally important asset.
There is a very strong follower base, and it is by all extents a battle-tested blockchain. And it's an asset for
which there is clear demand and enthusiasm. And ownership through an ETF allows investors,
institutions to own the underlying through a structure on which they can get leverage
through their normal channels. Yeah, I'd absolutely agree with that. It's also an asset that is backed by a blockchain that's really unique, has unique characteristics. And I think when you're early in the development and rollout of a majorly disruptive technology like power, an asset with a really dedicated group of supporters, and a really differentiated technology that it's easy to imagine the real world applications of.
And at this stage of blockchain's growth, that's a great product to have, and we're excited to have it in the market.
Amazing. And then, Mike, could you tell us a little bit more about how do you think about stablecoins and XRP as margin collateral on various venues and derivative platforms?
How does Bitnomial think about it? How do you think about it?
What does it mean for traders and institutions and how they look to trade in the future?
trade in the future?
Yeah, so that's a great question.
Yeah, so that's a great question.
I think the important thing that we think about is people have assets on their balance
sheet and they want to put them to use where they can.
So, for example, let's talk about DATS for a second.
Any XRP DATS are going to have a lot of XRP on their balance sheet.
Now there could be certain things that they want to do with that.
They may want to do, tap into additional financing. They may want to have, maybe they want to get into CapEx spending,
something like this. What they're going to be able to do is they're going to be able to need
to put that asset down somewhere and do something with it. And I think what we can do here at
Bitnomial is that putting down those digital assets to either risk manage, gain leverage
is really important. And I think just for the broader
ecosystem in general. So think about it this way. For robust lending markets to kind of come into
fruition, you need a lot of risk management tools. And what a lot of those financiers and lenders do
is they'll take assets and then they'll risk manage them via options or you know hedging whatever they
want to do and if you can't do that in a in a capital efficient way it becomes very expensive
and ultimately they pass those on to the the borrowers themselves so i think that's what
we're trying to do is we're trying to drive down um borrowing rates via people being able to put
their native collateral at a clearing house so that they don't have to you know borrow against
that and put down dollars which is very complicated and is very
common for the derivatives industry today is just use us dollars obviously you know you can go otc
but unfortunately then you have you know counterparty risk and there's is does and all sorts of fun
complicated things in legal agreements you have to get yourself into to be able to achieve that
and so in a centralized a centralized exchange and clearing model
that we operate, we're trying to make it as seamless
as possible for everyone to use the digital assets
that they have to be able to risk manage
and get the leverage they need
for whatever kind of trading opportunities they need,
all the way from speculators, hedgers,
to people doing lending and financing to everybody.
On the second part of that is for the stable coins,
is I think that we see stable coins take off as just a better method of payment.
And I think that there's a lot of, and there's a contingent from what we have seen on the
crypto native side where the kind of the abandonment of US dollars to some degree,
where you can't move it very quickly, you know, your bank accounts can get shut down,
you know, everything else that we've seen in the past.
And so people are really starting to use stable coins and being able to accept it natively without having to use an on or off ramp is really important.
And so, you know, Phenomial Exchange is looking to accept RLUSD very shortly as a way for margining and collateralizing trades.
And so really excited to be on the forefront of that and uh and kind of push the things push this way forward absolutely love to see uh stable coins and with no mill
uh at some point i think just bring to bring us home uh into the home stretch uh and question for
everyone uh every one of you what are you most excited to see in the next uh in the next wave
in the larger xrp, both from a technical and product
perspective? And where do you see participation from retail and institutional investors transitioning
into? Sure. I'll take a shot from a 30,000-foot view, which is that I think the market doesn't
realize how big a deal both stablecoins and tokenization are, and they're going to find out over the next 12 months.
And so seeing XRP build its case on the stablecoin side, seeing it participate in the broader
RWA market, I think is going to really open some eyes.
So really excited about that.
In terms of how institutions are interacting with that,
they are all looking for ways to invest in those trends, particularly with market prices where they
are. So I know our team is out talking to investors every day about XRP and its emerging
role in those ecosystems. So I'm just excited to see that play out over the next few quarters.
So I'm just excited to see that play out over the next few quarters.
I am as well.
And again, we have a strong, vibrant community.
I think generally from a blockchain and crypto perspective, there's a lot of cases where product
market fit has kind of lagged the price sentiment and the narrative.
You know, we think that that's going to change over time.
You have, as Matt said, a battle-tested blockchain that has a real opportunity to capture market
share as we see the proliferation of these use cases.
And ultimately, I think a lot of the excitement comes just from the demand.
So, you know, as we talk to investors around the country, enthusiasts, stakeholders, it's
one of the broadest communities and there are a lot of diehard fans.
And the sales team was just telling me that, you know, anecdotally, advisors are constantly
asked by their clients about XRP.
And in some cases, it's the second most talked about asset in this community behind Bitcoin.
So, you know, we're all very excited.
Yeah, same here. I think from Binomial's
point of view, I think there's kind of two exciting things that we want to talk about is
one is, you know, obviously supporting more XRP products like options. I think, you know,
it's very exciting for people to, you know, potentially create different yield strategies
with their XRP portfolios and be able to expand kind of, you know, and support whatever the
blockchain has there in terms of real world assets, you know, listing those on, you know, dirt is on those would be, I think, a really exciting development. But ultimately, stable coins and specifically RLUSD is a very exciting development. You know, every day when we talk about clearing and settlement and, you know, 24 hour trading, you know, the movement of money is always the biggest problem. I can't tell you
how many conversations I have with different, you know, with different brokers and banks that are,
you know, worried about, well, how do we, you know, risk manage over the weekend when people
are trading, but we can't move money. Stablecoin solves its problem and all the USD does specifically.
And so what we would like to see and what we're really pushing for is 24-7 trading and settlement.
And stablecoins will be the backbone of that because as it stands right now, there is no other way to do it.
And I think that's going to really push the industry forward.
And I think it's going to be a really exciting development that we're happy to be a part of.
All right. Amazing.
So just to summarize our entire session today, thank you. Thank you guys for amazing insights. To quickly summarize, not afraid of a little wall. We've seen a lot of cycles. Access continues to improve, whether it's jurisdictional products, different types of instruments that continues to improve the way users are accessing digital assets today on
battle-tested blockchains like XRP, a wide range of use cases.
Everything continues to improve.
I thoroughly enjoyed our chat today.
Thank you, Ray.
Thank you, Matt.
Thank you, Mike, for joining us.
XRP community.
I hope you enjoyed this session.
Next up is the EMEA Innovation Spotlight.
Hang tight. Amazing stuff to follow.
Thank you, everyone. Thanks for having us on. You know, an honor to get to participate and talk to
this community. 100%. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Oh Thank you. Oh
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so Thank you. Music so Thank you. Music so
Thank you. Oh Hello and welcome everyone to the XRP Innovation Spotlight panel.
This is something that I am extremely passionate about.
So happy to be here.
I really appreciate Ripple, the team at Ripple X, and the team at XRP All Commons for making
the team at XRP All Commons for making this entire day possible. But, you know, here we are
this entire day possible.
going to highlight some projects that are interacting and developing different
products and networks that are interacting with the XRP Ledger. And of course, a couple of them
that I myself am very passionate about get to moderate today as well with my co-moderator, Zofie.
And so there's just, you know, I hope everybody enjoys this as much as I know I will.
And I'm happy to be here.
Zofie, go ahead.
Please jump in.
Hi, everyone.
I hope you can hear me well.
Really excited to be here and co-moderating this session
with you, Death Ranger. So my name is Jofi, and I'm leading community engagement at XRPL Commons.
Just a few words about Commons, in case you don't know about us yet. We support builders on the XRP
ledger through free development trainings and through our incubator program, the Aquarium,
where we are currently running our eighth cohort focused on social
impact with founders participating literally from all over the world.
And we are also hosting regular builder office hours where developers can get technical support
while building on the XRP ledger.
And the next one will take place tomorrow.
So if you want to tune in, you can follow us at xrpl underscore comments to stay updated but without
further ado let's get into today's session so we are focusing on project expanding real xrp utility
how this will work exactly so in the first 30 minutes we will hear from three projects
and then we will open the mic for other ecosystem projects to share briefly what they are working on.
So let's kick it off with Robert, CEO of Zaman, which you already might be familiar with,
but Zaman is one of the most widely used self-custody wallets in the XRP ecosystem.
So hi, Robert. And my first question to you is when people utilize Zaman, what do they
exactly use XRP for? What does real usage look like? And if you can also share maybe some examples
and statistics. Yes, thank you. I also hope everybody is having a nice XRP community today. And also thank you to Ripple for putting this together.
So I'll share some context with numbers before I jump into the question.
So Samaan's been around for over five years now.
There's never been a security breach.
And we're kind of like this standalone product in the XRP ecosystem
that everybody kind of knows
or everybody uses, etc.
Our users manage 1.5 million wallets,
which hold over 2.1 billion XRP collectively.
So those are some of the baseline numbers.
Last year, we averaged 280,000 monthly average users,
peaking around 400,000.
And when people use a month for XRP, we've seen it for every single year, payments. So sending, receiving XRP, that's by far the biggest use case and takes the biggest share of transactions.
And we're also seeing a big shift in what's happening in our Xapp ecosystem.
So for people who aren't aware, the traditional crypto term is decentralized apps.
In Saman we have Xapps, so Samanax, SRP apps.
And you're able to engage with the ecosystem in the wallet
without needing to leave the wallet.
And we're seeing a very big uptrend for DeFi that started last year and it's still continuing.
To give some numbers around that as well, then last year XApps were opened more than
10 million times. And another one that was mentioned in the earlier sessions, etc.
The one is that we might be in a crypto winter.
One thing that I love the XRPIL audience for is that, and what we also see from our data
is that people stay on the chain.
There's a lot of activity with those DeFi products going into RL, USD, etc.
On-off-ramping volumes, like off-ramping volumes aren't spiking.
So people really like to stay on chain and they like to interact with the XRP ledger.
And Saman for more than five years has been the place to do it.
That's very impressive.
And you touched on this a bit, but can you expand a bit more about maybe the user behavior
change you're seeing as XRP expands beyond payments?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think we've seen some great amendments in the past years.
And I think there are still some in the pipeline and some up for voting.
The big shift that happened in 2025 was yield products started popping up.
And that's been a question that our audience has asked us for years.
Again, our support team is something that we're extremely proud of.
I'm personally extremely proud of.
Last year, we had tens of thousands of tickets.
99.99% were closed within 24 hours.
So I always get the scoop from our support team.
And yield products are essentially, since again, what I earlier pointed out,
that people tend to stay on chain.
They don't really want to leave
from their XRP positions. So the logical thing to do is how can I earn yield with my XRP. So 2025
for some reason was the year that different projects started popping up and trying to
breach that cap and trying to bring an answer to that. So I think that's the big one other than
payments. And I also think that as the ecosystem grows, the tax is becoming more and more liquid
and more and more interesting assets are popping up. I think RLUSD is a big one.
And again, I think our user behavior, by far the biggest change in the past year and still
continuing was again, yield products, people want yield and they're voting with their money.
That, you know, that is, that is really interesting. And, you know, of course, like yield being
something that has just been something that has been being talked about in the ecosystem
and the community for a long time, and is only long time and is only being more of a popular topic.
From you guys and Zaman, what are you guys doing to position yourself
so that you can garner the greatest opportunities
for those who would be interacting and utilizing the wallet
to interact with these users?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I personally have the experience of working together with both my co-speakers,
so Hugo from Flair and FIG as well.
Again, from Saman's point of view, we are kind of like the signing layer for the ecosystem.
And if people are using the XRP Ledger, then most likely they're using Saman.
So we are working quite closely together with all of the yield platforms.
For example, Saman 5.0 introduced virtual assets that was targeted
for Flair's smart accounts.
So essentially enabling people to earn yield on their XRP with a few
clicks using Flair's technology.
So essentially your yield earning XRP will still be displayed on your home screen.
We're making that user experience a lot smoother for users who are looking for those yield
opportunities in a sense that you can literally access these yield apps, yield opportunities
from your home screen.
You don't need to go digging around in the XApp list, etc.
We also, again, I mean, the process to get listed into our XApp is quite thorough.
So in our feedback rounds, I also think that we've been able to give a lot of great feedback for different yield platforms that has made their product better, made our user experience more smoother.
And I think in the end, everybody wins.
Common being a project and a wallet that I've utilized for many years myself, super passionate about.
I really appreciate you being able to come up and speak to us today about the products you guys are building over there.
I'd really like it to go over actually to Hugo.
And Hugo, thank you very much for being here today.
Flare, of course, arguably, in my own opinion, the largest layer two interoperable network
interacting with the XRP ecosystem today.
And of course, FXRP being something that's highlighted
as this wrapped version of XRP being utilized
on the Flare network.
You guys have released a lot of updates
and a lot of changes recently trying to, you know, just promote this FXRP and this ability to lend and borrow this XRP on the Flare network.
You know, from you guys, what is it that people should really understand that the Flare network is providing for XRP and the XRP ledger
ecosystem. And, you know, some of the things that you guys have explored from an ability to
have a smooth interoperable experience occur.
Hi, I hope you can hear me. Thanks so much for having me. And thank you to Ripple for putting this day together.
So, you know, let's just frame Flare because there are a lot of listeners, some of whom may not be familiar with Flare.
So Flare is an institutionally focused smart chain where XRP can interact with both DeFi primitives and TradFi use cases that aren't available directly on the XRP ledger.
Think of Flare as working hand in glove with XRP and giving additional huge utility to both XRP
and most importantly, the XRPL. So, you know, right now on Flare, you know, we have lending
protocols, both more traditional lending protocols like a compound fork, which is called Kinetic.
And recently in the last couple of weeks, we have Mystic powered by Morpho, which is a newer modular lending protocol with isolated risk.
This is the type of lending protocol that is favored by institutions.
With DEXs for liquidity and both liquidity and most importantly, the ability to liquidate lending
positions. We have Enosis's CDP product protocol, which allows people to directly mint stablecoins
against an XRP holding. And we have PERPS, DEXs, and prediction markets. And these are kind of core
building blocks around how we think about making XRP have yield and be a collateral asset.
So those are the core building blocks.
And these type of building blocks are present in most ecosystems.
But then we have Firelight, which is a new foundational DeFi primitive built to benefit the entire space using XRP. And it offers the ability to stake your
XRP to earn yield by providing cover to blue chip DeFi protocols across many chains. And this is a
market with a vast potential size, and it offers organic on-chain yield for XRP. So Firelight,
on-chain yield for XRP.
So Firelight, in existing on Flare,
will further propel our ecosystem
through driving demand for XRP
and demand for borrowing and lending against XRP
in order to participate in Firelight.
So it's kind of like a core plank
to how we think about spinning up
the kind of demand flywheel for XRP.
So to tie this ecosystem together,
we also have on-chain vaults
that allow users to put their XRP
to work within the Flare ecosystem
without having to directly engage
with the DeFi protocols themselves.
And looking ahead,
we have two really interesting things.
The first is, as Robert said,
smart accounts, of which Zaman is one of the first partners.
And this will allow XRP users to access Flare
by making transactions directly on the XRPL.
No need to touch Flare.
So this will make using Flare's ecosystem feel like using XRPL.
And there'll be no other smart chain in any ecosystem that we are aware of
that will feel as native as using Flare with XRPL.
So it's a great UI improvement.
We'll be starting with one, maybe two-click yield solutions
directly on XRPL with smart accounts.
These make a transaction on the XRPL and the intention of that transaction is then autonomously executed on Flare using Flare's
data protocols. We'll then be building out further functionality over time so that Flare's
full suite of powerful functions can be used with XRP,
giving sort of practically native functionality.
And this will drive transaction activity on the XRPL itself.
And as we support more functionality, it'll actually give XRP more to do.
And then really the second thing, which is, I think, really much bigger,
is that Flare is building a compute layer together with something called protocol managed wallets.
Those protocol managed wallets manage assets on the XRP ledger, not just XRP, potentially any issued asset on the XRP ledger. And this combines it with hugely scalable
and private compute environment
for both XRP and issued XRP ledger assets.
And I think it's important for people to understand.
There's been a lot of conversation today about tokenization.
And Ripple is leading the charge in tokenization
and putting that on the XRPO.
And the question is, you know,
once you have all these tokenized assets,
what can you do with them?
Well, really, what we're building with the compute layer
and with protocol managed wallets,
you can build any institutional or crypto focused use case. So what we're building
with our compute layer and what we define as Flare 2.0, it won't just let XRP do more, it'll let the
XRP ledger itself do more without having to do any protocol changes. So from the XRP ledger's
perspective and Ripple's perspective, they're able to offer tokenization with private compute, i.e. the ability to transact between parties in complex manners privately without having to touch the XRPL code.
And this puts them straight to the head of the queue on where to tokenize.
Wow, that is incredible. I hope everybody in this space, if not, didn't get to comprehend that.
Everything you had just said goes back and listens to that because incredible things that you guys
are building for the XRP Ledger ecosystem. And thinking about, you know, of course,
there's like tokenized assets that exist on the XRP Ledger, could you see those types of assets also interacting with these lending
markets and, you know, through partners like this Morpho and Mystic partnership that has been made?
So absolutely. I mean, our goal is to essentially offer the XRP first and then the XRPL, effectively a full smart chain
with seamless interaction through smart accounts.
And then to go a little further than that,
because Flare is a blockchain,
but when we have our compute environment,
we can do quite exciting things with those assets in private.
And that's absolutely critical for institutional use cases.
So what I see is a flare as being extremely complimentary
to Ripple and the XRPL's efforts to push tokenization,
to really bring the TradFi world onto new rails, with Flare effectively being an outlet for all of that,
once you have the assets in place and those are on the XRPL, what do you do with them?
Flare is a good answer for that.
I really appreciate you for coming up today, Hugo, and sharing some of your time.
I, of course, lover of the Flare Network and all of the people we have up here as panelists so far, but it's incredible to hear all
the things that are being built to support the XRP Ledger, XRP and the ecosystem around it.
Thank you, Hugo, for sharing your experience and also all the amazing possibilities that Flare opens up for the XRP Ledger.
And now let's also turn to Fig, our third speaker of today, who is the co-founder of
Squid Router.
Squid Router focuses on cross-chain liquidity and making assets usable across ecosystems.
So essentially what it allows is for users to swap and bridge any token across over 100 blockchains, including XRP and the XRP-L EVM.
Hi, Fig. Nice to have you here.
Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.
I feel like you're one of the best people to talk about interoperability.
And yeah, I guess in the context of this, to you uh why does cross-chain access matter for the xrp
right now yeah i think it's a a really good time for cross-chain because crypto is just getting so
much real adoption and xrp is like leading that of course with institutions but there's there's so much adoption on other ecosystems as well and i think access is probably the most important part for building relationships
business relationships um users everyone who wants to access the xop ledger from a blockchain like
solana ethereum even bitcoin and some some of the other less used blockchains
is cross-chain. You need to be able to access it in one click. XRP is a top five asset in crypto.
We've got RLUSD coming up, probably the safest stablecoin in the entire crypto ecosystem.
stable coin in the entire crypto ecosystem.
And if the XRP community wants to drive adoption to these two assets
and everything else that's being built on XRPL,
we need really good open trade routes with the other blockchains.
And you could see this in a competitive way
where we want XRP to be the only blockchain xrpl um but i think you know
we've seen time and time again over the course of history that free markets like are a positive
something for everyone and you know the innovation and um adoption of crypto happening on other
chains can actually drive more adoption and innovation on the XRP ledger as well.
And it's like cross-chain that's the missing link there, like being able to bring those innovations across and let users traverse the ecosystem and adopt XRP's tech.
And super cool, right?
And super cool, right?
I mean, thinking about interoperability
and being able to interact with other networks
and expand this XRPL ecosystem is truly a highlight.
And you and your team,
you guys have been building some great things.
The thought of putting this into practice, right?
Could you briefly maybe walk us through, right?
How does SquidRouter actually connect all of these networks and that seamless interaction that occurs through that?
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, go through some examples.
So, I mean, the first really simple example is where the official,
with Axler, bridge for XRP between the sidechain,
the XRPL sidechain and the main ledger.
So you can use Squid to, if you have XRP on XRP,
you can go to our application, or if you're a developer,
you can use our API to transfer that XRP over to the sidechain
where there's an EVM environment and, you know,
building ecosystem of apps over there.
But then Squid actually supports 100 chains,
and we support tens of thousands of tokens so
if you're a user on solana and you've been trading meme coins but now you want to do something a
little bit less risky you can swap your solana over to rl usd we don't actually support rl usd
just yet but we will soon you can swap it over to RLUSD, hopefully invest in a yield product on XRPL,
and we've got lending coming soon on the ledger. So really excited for all of these products to
come up. And then lastly, if you're an institution who issues assets, these huge institutions
like BlackRock and SecureTiresies and the list goes on, they often
issue assets on multiple chains. So if they've issued an asset on Ethereum and they also want
to issue it on XRPL, then our technology allows sort of a combination of off-chain and on-chain
logic to happen where these asset issuers are actually off-chain, they're institutions. And our protocol allows market
makers to kyb, onboard with these institutions and allow the
issuing, minting and burning of these assets. And then the market makers also
plug into SQUID and you can move these, say, from Ethereum to XRPL and back.
So our protocol is fully decentralized and non-custodial,
so we never take control of users' funds,
and that really helps distribution.
We can offer the protocol.
Well, it runs that's
autonomously so it can be accessed from any jurisdiction and then we can pick
and choose places where you know market makers work with institutions to do
cross-chain activity I'll stop there it's getting a bit a bit technical
yeah speaking of technical actually I found it super cool when I was looking through
your site that you have something that's called Squid School, where you explain like highly
technical topics and in super easy terms. So I was wondering, what's your goal with this platform?
Is this something that's going to grow as well? Because I found it super interesting.
Yeah, thanks, Sophie. Yeah, thanks Sophie.
Yeah, we put so much effort into that.
When we launched on XRPL, I think we did 32 different XRPL-focused tutorials,
everything from setting up a wallet to, you know, what is a token.
And Squid's always been about access. And's means all the technical things that I was talking
about before but in reality crypto is a really scary place it's intimidating even to people
technical people like me and we think that access mission making crypto simple and accessible to
the world extends all the way through user experience and education.
So that's the reason we've invested in Squid School.
And it's going to become more and more part of what we do.
We break down the products internally at Squid into, you know, we've got different technical products,
but Squid School is there as like one of the top six things that we work on.
So, yeah, glad you called that out thanks thanks for the words fantastic really glad to see that growing
as well um i think without further ado we can jump into the second section of this uh session
so um for projects who are listening to this session, we kindly ask you to request to speak from your corporate handle.
And in this 30 minutes, we will try to give the floor to several projects to explain briefly what they are doing, what they are building on the XRP ledger.
So I'll just leave a few seconds for projects to to join and we have
Anodos here hi Panos welcome up hello guys how are you good how are you yeah
doing well here we keep building up XRP Community Day.
And I'm glad to have you up here.
Of course, another project that I am passionate about in the community and Panos yourself and your partner,
you guys have been building for many years already.
If you would like to go over, Anidos,
what you guys are building and where you've started
and where you see the future going for you guys.
I'd love to hear it.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, I mean, personally, I've been in the XRP ecosystem now for over a decade.
We started Anodos back in 2023.
And since the last XRP Community Day, many things have changed, but our mission remains the same,
which is to bring DeFi to the average person.
We want to build this front door for mass adoption and the killer consumer app for the XRPL ecosystem.
And my favorite analogy is always what Ripple is doing for institutions,
Anodex is trying to do for retail and consumers.
And we believe that we need to have these powerful features of XRPL accessible
to anyone. And we have Anodex, our XRPL DEX interface, which has now evolved into a one-stop
shop for all things DeFi on the XRP Ledger, which includes swaps, MMPools, on-off ramps,
bridging, and the Anodex wallet that we launched two months ago.
And it's XRPL's first PASCII-powered wallet, powered by Ripple's Palisade
MBC technology, and allows everyone for the first time to create an XRPL account
in roughly 10 seconds with their biometrics.
We also continue being infrastructure contributors and the UNL validator. We're
also currently building a few developer tools like an API infrastructure and the sandbox
environment for XRPL developers and the community to be able to experiment with XRPL and also
test new amendments easily. And finally, the main focus for this year
is the Anodos Neobank, which is the first financial super
app and, as we call it, XRPL-powered bank.
And this is a completely on-chain and decentralized banking
super app that will also bring the first self-carsinal card
where people and users will be able to spend XRP and RLUSD
in collaboration with Visa.
And our end goal is millions of people using XRPL
without ever realizing it and bringing this massive on-chain
activity.
So yeah, we are cooking lots of big things at the moment.
And yeah, just make sure you follow us and sign up on the waitlist of the Neobank for
early access.
Great.
Thank you so much, Panos.
Looking at other projects here, we have Mandla Mani.
Can you speak? No.
Cool. Great. Thanks, Sophie.
Yes. Perfect. Fantastic. Good evening, everybody. My name is Julian.
I am one of the founders at Mandla Money based in Cape Town, South Africa. And what we are building is a stablecoin platform
that allows people to send and receive stablecoins to sell numbers,
so via WhatsApp and via SMS.
I think we can think of this as, you know, sending money using Apple Pay, except we are doing this using XRP or RLUSD or any
stablecoin issued on the XRP ledger to a receiver's cell phone number. So that's at the heart of the
stablecoin platform. What we've recently added is a capability to allow for bulk payments.
So this would be, you know,
if you have maybe a government
that is distributing social grants or welfare
or maybe an NGO that's distributing aid
in a civil contingency affected area,
the login to web platform,
login with an XRPO wallet,
and then just put in the cell numbers of
the recipients and the amount that they need to pay.
Then they click on pay and then that is
distributed to these user cell phone numbers.
They receive notifications via WhatsApp and SMS,
and they can sign up and create a wallet if they don't already have one.
And then they can then do peer-to-peer transfers amongst themselves, or they can then cash out through off-ramp through an exchange or a local off-ramp partner.
We like to think of this as the evolution of mobile money in emerging markets.
You might be familiar with maybe M-Pesa in Kenya, in East Africa, or other mobile money type of solutions.
And this is really now mobile money powered by stable coins on the XRP ledger. I think for this year, one of our bigger plans is to add payroll capability to this bulk
distribution platform so that instead of just distributing relief aid or social grants,
we can also then have gig or remote workers being paid via stable points to their
wallets as well. So that's what we're building. And the idea here is just to try and address
financial inclusion and allow for people to be able to do these micro payments, which are
otherwise expensive in emerging markets using traditional payment rails.
So, yeah, I think in a nutshell, that is us.
A B2B2C stablecoin platform allowing people to send and receive stablecoins to their cell phone numbers.
That was a really interesting thing there that you guys are actually building.
Can you dove a little bit deeper into that?
So being able to essentially transfer value through what would be a message on a phone?
Yeah, absolutely. So what we do behind the scenes is we generate a wallet for a user
that is mapped to their cell phone number. The inspiration for using a platform like WhatsApp is it's easily one of the most used applications in emerging markets from a messaging point of view.
So users now don't have to start trying to download a separate app altogether or separate wallet.
And they don't think about the complexity of secret keys and all of that.
They do have a PIN code that only they know that they use to access the wallet
and an OTP to give these wallets like 10-minute sessions.
But the idea here is really to just try and abstract that complexity and
allow users to then just make use of cell phone numbers.
I think the parallel,
the other inspiration for this is,
this is how mobile money in emerging markets currently works, right? So I spent a bit of time in Kenya last year
just to try and get immersed into the mobile money ecosystem.
And it's the same sort of thing.
They make use of mobile money via feature phones,
sending funds to one another using their cell phone numbers.
And those mobile money platforms are typically operated
by mobile network operators.
And so for us, we are really just looking at an evolution
of that paradigm that's familiar
to people in emerging markets,
and then just bringing in this new form of payment.
Maybe I think just my last point there, in an ideal world,
there's no need to actually off-ramp.
If you're using a stable coin that represents a currency
that's already accepted within that region,
then there wouldn't be a need to off-ramp,
it's just now down to merchant adoption.
Or the other use case would even just be
using it as a store of value, right?
You want to hedge against your local currency depreciating
and want to hold some US dollar stablecoin.
Yep, so we have integrated our LUSD as well.
So really, really excited about that.
Thank you so much, Mandla Mani, and I'm really excited and curious to see how everything you do evolves also in the Aquarium Incubator Program with XRPL Commons.
Next up, we also have Axiom here.
Hi, hello. Can you hear me well? Yes, we can hear you perfectly. Can you
share a bit more about what you're building and how you're using the XRP Ledger? Yeah, sure. Well,
thank you, Joffi and Defundjo for the invitation. And thanks, Ripple, for organizing this event.
Thanks, Ripple, for organizing this event.
So I'm Guillaume, co-founder of Axiom Protocol.
So recently we launched Axiom.
This is the first prediction market in the XRPL ecosystem.
It's running on the EVM sidechain.
So we went live on January the 19th.
the 19th. And since then, we have been building strong momentum. So a lot of people are speaking
And since then we have been building strong momentum.
about prediction markets right now. And I think that's one of the most powerful narrative in
crypto at the moment. In January alone, the two biggest, Polymarket and Calci combined,
they generated more than 60 billion in volume. So they show that there was a demand for this product,
and I don't think it's going to change.
So at this point, six months ago, we asked ourselves,
why doesn't XRPL have its own prediction markets?
And that's exactly what we have been building for the last six months
so so far we have generated more than 80 000 us dollar in volume with more than 500 users
and it's growing week over week and we can see strong spikes during major events like for example last sunday there was the
superboard and this was the biggest market we uh in volume we saw so far on the platform
and we expect many more to come within the year so in a nutshell right now axom, you can trade many different markets. Because we are like XRPL focused,
and we come from the XRPL community,
we have released many XRPL related markets.
For example, today, we created some markets around
what would be the keywords that Brad might say at community day.
We also have like a lot of different crypto prices,
hourly and daily timeframes.
We've got stocks.
We've got a lot of different sports like NBA, NFL,
and we are going to release UFC next week.
So currently, we operate as a shared parametric model for the market.
That means that there is no front liquidity required for the user,
and not for us as well.
So, it's extremely efficient for bootstrapping the platform,
but we expect more to come in the coming month.
That's why we are currently working on two different improvements.
First is going to be the central limit order book.
This is something that is a standard for prediction markets.
It's bid-ask trading and continuous price discovery with early exits.
and continuous price discovery with early exits.
So on prediction market, users need to feel super smooth
when they are entering or exiting a market.
So that's why we want to add this centrally limit order book
with market makers.
And also to support this,
we are partnering with institutional market makers to provide an efficient way for people to just trade.
So because at the end of the day, what's the difference between different prediction markets is the liquidity and the user experience from the users.
So we really think that we will be able to bring
as much liquidity as we can
to the world XRPL ecosystem through the platform
and through professional market makers.
And one last thing I want to speak about is RLUSD.
Well, we all think that stablecoin is going to be
one of the biggest narratives in the coming years. And I mean, when you speak about prediction
markets, you really, you think you're going to bet through dollars because when you are going
to spot markets, you bet in dollars. When you are betting, if it's going up, it's going to be dollars.
So we really think that this can become the convergence asset for the prediction market
and bring a lot of liquidity on the XRPL ecosystem and XRPL EVM.
Thanks to Screed, though, we are able to bring many people from the mainnet, from Ethereum.
I know we are speaking with Screed, so Solana is going to drop soon, I guess.
So Solana user could come on the platform as well.
So just to finish, XM is live today.
If you are a trader, just come, try the market.
If you have new ideas for new markets we are
always open to exploring new new kind of markets and for market makers reach out to us especially
as we are moving to CLOB if you want to partner and like try to to enter those markets we are
really open to to discuss on that so yeah we believe prediction markets is going to be
the next big thing on xrpl and big narrative on crypto at all so yeah we need to be first on that
well thank you so much for speaking about axiom and what you guys are building over there
we're coming up towards the end of uh end. We have about 10, 15 more minutes.
We're going to keep it going on.
But we have, you know, one or two other projects.
We'd love to let's speak and highlight what they're building.
One of them has just came up.
BlockVault, welcome up to the space.
If you would like to please jump in and speak about a little bit
of what you guys are building.
Thank you for the opportunity.
Can you hear me?
Yes, we hear you.
Fantastic. Well, yeah, so Block Vault, I've been in the space for the past four years building on the XRP where my co-founder, Andrew, we're both building separate projects and saw the opportunity to join forces and tackle the yield space. As Robert mentioned earlier, you know, in 2025, that was
the year where yield really came into focus. And we see this as a really big opportunity,
especially for XRP, given that only 0.15% of XRP is currently in yield and comparing that to other
chains, significantly lagging. And so I guess that's where we really see that opportunity.
A bit about BlockVault, we were part of Cohort 7
in the aquarium residency for XRPL Commons.
It was a fantastic opportunity to go to Paris for three months,
build with other like-minded creators.
And that cohort was primarily focused on DeFi opportunities so stable coins
yield generation and XRP value amplifiers as mentioned we focused on the yield generation
just given our belief that this is such a you know important area for XR um and and yeah that that's really where we saw the opportunity to to jump into um
and i'm keen to talk about two things so uh in terms of yield we see an opportunity on on-chain
yield um particularly targeting sophisticated and institutional customers uh with two different
types of yielding options um and obviously there are multiple different types of yielding options.
And obviously there are multiple different types of yielding options, which we are really excited that are coming to life in the space.
But particularly we're interested in volatility based yielding and then
eventually lending based yielding through the upcoming amendments for XLS 66D,
which is hopefully coming into effect later this year.
But yeah, as mentioned,
we're in the early stages of beta testing.
We've built this engine where we think that there's
an opportunity to really utilize and put to work XRP
with bear markets and bull markets.
That's the beauty of having yield because you can stay in the space
and, you know, continue to hold that exposure
without, you know, losing access to XRP.
And yeah, we're really excited about having this
as a new way or a new path forward
for um people in the community uh in in the xrp community um so yeah if you wanted to if you want
to you know follow along to our on our journey um our x is obviously here um you can hear more
about what we're building uh as mentioned, we aren't live,
but we are looking to build and deploy something
hopefully later this year.
Always open for a chat as well.
No, thank you very much for coming up
and speaking about what you guys are building, Block.
Well, look forward to see it
and what you guys continue to do in the future.
Two more speakers we have up here
uh if you guys could keep it short we're keeping it to uh possibly a five minutes each um having
an issue getting you up here xfilm sorry but uh expector if you would like to uh jump in please
feel free to speak about what you guys are building project wise um and uh if you could keep it that
five five minute shorts and uh we'll uh we'll jump over to Expo and we'll close up after
That's Rager, thanks for having me
and I'll keep it shorter than
five minutes. Ripple, thanks for
hosting it. Anodos, Axiom
Sophie, Hugo, Commons
you know, it's a pleasure and I'm
honored to be here on stage
We are doing something that is
more on the gaming side
however, we're not building a game we see it
as the 3d internet and i think that ripple has in its profile that they are building the internet
of value well we are building the experiential layer the immersive layer on top of that xrpl
native we've been around for four years i've been in the ecosystem for more than seven years
We've been around for four years.
I've been in the ecosystem for more than seven years,
using, of course, Zaman wallet as our wallet of preference.
And we hope to be able to onboard lots of people
from outside the ecosystem to our project
and, of course, to the XRPL.
If you don't know what we're doing,
make sure that you give us a follow.
We create 3D immersive experiences.
It can be personal spaces.
It can be games.
We can have brands in there, corporate training, education, and so on.
To give you some idea for the people that don't know us,
we have an official partnership with Alpine,
the very famous french car brand and also their formula one team we have zao dao in there in our
the very famous French car brand, and also their Formula One team.
virtual world with an experience and we will do some more with them sophie xrpl commons i don't
know if i can spill the secret but if i'm not mistaken commons will have a presence in our
world very soon as well we have about 50 plus ecosystem partners projects we have 300
plus independent builders using our edk or environment development kit and about 10 000
unique holders every asset in our world is represented by an nft on the xrpl i think in
absolute numbers in dollar value if you take our pre-sales in account, that we are responsible for somewhere around 20% of all NFT-related volume on the XRPL.
If you guys are interested, and we really want to populate our world with serious businesses,
and we have proved that serious businesses are interested in what we're doing,
one of our partners is Schumann Financial, issuer of the Europe Stablecoin, also on the XRPL, Mika Compliant.
One of our other partners that has a building and an immersive experience inside Xpector is Amina Bank Global,
a Swiss fully regulated crypto-friendly bank and the first bank in Europe that implemented Ripple payment rails.
So there is a lot of things to do. It's the fun layer.
Hugo, I've been speaking to Quantic and to people on your team. I would be really happy to have Flair in there as well. Axiom and Anados, you guys are invited as well. We will build amazing stuff for you guys. And we really want to be that marketing layer. Initially, you know, to start discovering what we can do together.
know to start discovering what we can do together first of all it's getting a presence inside our
world then we can discover what kind of immersive experiences we can create but it's a lot of fun
it's great visuals it's unreal engine you know i'm not a gamer when i'm jumping it i smile from
when i get in until i get out now the next thing that we need to do is populate the world and you
know and this is something that
I shouldn't tell but I tend to spill secrets we have a potential huge partnership with the
biggest sports conglomerate in the world City Football Group the owners of Manchester City
but they want to see traction and they want to see a world full of people full of businesses
and full of activity so this is a big call out to everybody in this space not
only community members it's not about buying tokens or nfts we can do custom built immersive
experiences for you guys and you will be stunned so feel free to shoot a dm dms are open that
ranger i think i'm well below the five minutes again i'm very grateful to have you guys we've
been around for quite
a while. We've survived lots of things and we're still showing up, still building and
still here to support everybody else building in this ecosystem.
Yeah, that was perfect. Thank you very much for coming up Xpector and speaking about what
you guys are building and, you know, highlighting all of the, all these different metrics and, you know, products that are being utilized by the XRP
and the XRP Ledger itself ecosystem-wise. So, just appreciate everybody who came up today. I hope
everyone continues to listen to these spaces throughout today and tomorrow for all of the
different regions and geolocations. So far from what I've gotten to listen to these spaces throughout today and tomorrow for all of the different regions and geolocations.
So far from what I've gotten to listen to, everything has been just information rich and packed.
And of course, getting to share these experiences with the community is exactly why I think Ripple is hosting these spaces.
Brad said something earlier, right? The XRP to them is the North Star and always has been.
XRP to them is the North Star and always has been.
And, you know, I continue to believe that as well for my own self, from looking at the potential of what these technologies will really offer.
Yes, that's right. And let's not forget that we also have a very exciting announcement at the end of this session.
this session so if you if you kept listening throughout the session um you actually get a big
reward because we are just announcing the second swag drop of the day so the ripple x account just
shared the link in the comment section of this x space and you can just sign up to to win one of
bags and if you missed it then don't worry uh there will be one drop uh throughout
the event and yeah without further ado i think uh we can wrap up this session and this is the end
of the of the first session out of the three happening and you can tune in into the americas and apac ones as well thank you so much
thank you guys talk to you soon
Host
Speaker
xSPECTAR ™
from
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