Written by Ripple president Monica Long, the article outlines the company’s vision for the future of global financial infrastructure through the use of blockchain technology and digital crypto assets.
Ripple was founded on the belief that blockchain would become the global financial infrastructure of the future and has been working towards realizing this vision for over a decade.
The evolution of the cryptocurrency market and the roadmap of Ripple’s blockchain
The article begins with an overview of the evolution of the cryptocurrency market. In the beginning, when Bitcoin was priced at less than $20 and Ethereum did not yet exist, the market lacked infrastructure, liquidity, reliability, and regulatory clarity.
But today, the first BTC and ETH spot ETFs have been approved in the United States, BlackRock has launched the first tokenized fund on a public blockchain, the European Union has implemented comprehensive regulation with MiCA, and financial institutions and payment companies such as Fidelity, Itau Unibanco, Stripe, and PayPal are making cryptocurrencies more accessible to their customers.
Ripple has taken advantage of this market maturation to adapt and expand its product suite. Initially, the company focused on cross-border payments, leveraging the XRP Ledger (XRPL) and its native digital asset, XRP, to move value efficiently. Thanks to XRPL’s speed, low cost, transparency, and scalability, Ripple Payments has a near-global reach across more than 80 payment markets, processing more than $50 billion in transaction volume.
The acquisition of Metaco in 2023 marked a significant step for Ripple. Metaco, a digital asset custody technology provider, serves top-tier banks such as BBVA Switzerland, HSBC, and Société Générale. This allowed Ripple to further strengthen its product offering by founding Ripple Custody, aiming to expand its presence in the digital asset custody sector.
Connecting TradFi with Cryptocurrencies
Another important development covered in the article is the upcoming release of Ripple USD (RLUSD), a stablecoin available on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. This step aims to bridge the gap between traditional finance (TradFi) and cryptocurrencies, integrating RLUSD into Ripple Payments to address customers’ growing needs for cross-border payments. The article highlights why XRPL’s reliability, high performance, low transaction costs, and speed make it the blockchain of choice for institutional DeFi use cases.
XRPL is the fulcrum of Ripple’s technology infrastructure and has processed over 2.8 billion transactions without any outages or security breaches since 2012. Its native decentralized exchange (DEX) allows users to trade any kind of token without an intermediary and offers advanced features such as automatic bridging and pathfinding to find the best trades.
Ripple is working with various projects, including Zoniqx, Orchestra Finance, CredeFi, Sologenic, and Archax, to build applications on top of XRPL and bring modern financial products to traditional finance. By integrating XRPL’s advanced technical and financial capabilities directly into Ripple’s business, the benefits of decentralized finance can be delivered to customers around the world in a secure and compliant way.
Conclusion and Ripple’s Ambitions
Ripple has demonstrated its longevity by weathering bull and bear cycles in the cryptocurrency market. The company has always adopted a long-term vision and worked with financial institutions, regulators and policymakers to transform legacy systems from the inside.
Ripple’s goal is to become the leading provider of digital asset infrastructure for financial services. The company aims to be the reference point for businesses that want to integrate blockchain into their operations without having to develop and maintain the technology in-house. With its experience and established reputation, Ripple stands out as one of the few players that can provide a complete digital infrastructure connecting TradFi and cryptocurrencies.
Monica Long’s article covers Ripple’s efforts towards building a global financial infrastructure based on blockchain and digital assets. Through product evolution, the integration of new technologies such as digital asset custody, and the launch of stablecoins, Ripple is building a bridge between the worlds of traditional finance and cryptocurrency.
With a long-term vision and collaboration with financial institutions and regulators, Ripple has established itself as a leader in the financial services digital infrastructure sector.
