On Ep. 20 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine is joined by Monica Long, President @ Ripple to discuss Ripple USD, stablecoins, custody and more!
On Ep. 20 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine is joined by Monica Long, President @ Ripple to discuss Ripple USD, stablecoins, custody and more!
Timestamps:
This episode is brought to you by Visa
A world leader in digital payments, Visa is bridging the gap between traditional financial institutions and innovative blockchain networks, helping players in the payments ecosystem navigate the ever-evolving world of tokenized fiat currencies with confidence and ease. Learn more at visa.com/crypto.
This podcast is also presented by BVNK.
BVNK is the leading provider of stablecoin payments infrastructure—helping businesses move money faster, settle globally, and even launch their own stablecoin products. Head to BVNK.com to learn more!
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We’d also like to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they are representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial, investment or legal advice, do your own research!
Monica 00:00
Simon,
Sy Taylor 00:10
welcome to tokenized. My name is Simon Taylor. I am your host of the tokenized podcast, author at FinTech brain food and head of strategy at Salt. Dean and joining us today is Monica long the president of ripple. How are you? Monica?
Monica 00:24
I'm very well. Simon, Happy Friday. Happy
Sy Taylor 00:28
Friday. Yay. Indeed. Excited to have you on the show. I didn't realize that you've been at ripple for 11 and a half years. Has anybody been at a crypto company longer than you like? Are you in the Guinness Book of World Records? Yet,
Monica 00:45
I hope I'm not. I'm surely well our CTO David Schwartz, he co invented the ledger, and so he was one of the early employees of ripple, and he is still with us, doing his thing. So I think he's the most tenured guy at the company.
Sy Taylor 01:01
Every now and then prices of crypto tokens move, and everybody pays attention again and forgets that this was sort of 1012, years in the making, a lot of these times. So there's a lot that's happened. Of course, we need to remind listeners that views and opinions of contributors are their own and don't necessarily reflect those of companies they're representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial or legal advice. Please do your own research, and with that, why don't we start Monica by explaining what is ripple in 2025 because you probably get that a lot, but you do a lot these days. So help me understand what is ripple today. What is XRP, the ledger? How does all of this separate? Yeah,
Monica 01:42
happy to so you called out. Ripple is a 12 year old company, so I haven't been there for the entirety of the time, but it is one of the OGS in the crypto blockchain space. I would say there's been chapters to the story. So very fair to say, in 2025 where we in the novel, what's been consistent since the very beginning is, and I think that's why this is the reason a lot of us are in this space, is ripple, as a company and team of people, we've always had this foundational belief blockchain is the future financial rail. It's the thing that's going to modernize the financial system and make lots of activity, transactions of many different things, a lot more efficient and will spawn new use cases. So I would say ripple present day, we are contributing to that industry wide vision for the future in two ways. One is set of software that we provide to primarily financial institutions now, I would say it's enterprise ready, though, so it could be beyond that in the future, in this set of infrastructure, software enables them to tokenize, store, move and exchange value, and so that includes our primary use case around payments we can talk more about that includes digital asset custody, and then, as kind of a oil to the machine a stable coin called ripple USD. The second way in which we contribute to that future is through our continued work on the open source code base of XRP ledger. So this is a public blockchain. I believe it was the first alt chain to Bitcoin. I know Litecoin launched within, I think, a couple weeks of XRP ledger. So no tone was first, but it was definitely the first alt chain to launch with a novel consensus mechanism, because it didn't use proof of work. And so we continue to contribute code to that blockchain, and then we also support other developers building on it. So that's through grants programs and developer toolkits and that kind of thing. Yeah,
Sy Taylor 03:49
it's kind of a split between XRP the ledger and ripple, the company. You see, a lot of people are probably familiar with the Ethereum foundation and how it works with the Ethereum ledger, but then also those consensus and there are many other businesses in that ecosystem, but you also see foundation slash, Foundation funds, a private business to do some work, like you would see with uniswap. So that model is one that I think people don't necessarily understand that distinction, and it's not very clear. So I appreciate you calling that out. Talk to me about let's double click on each of these payments, custody and stables. What is the payments business today, and what does it do? So
Monica 04:27
we help primarily licensed payment service providers. That's our main customer, I would say, in 2024 and now in 2025 if I were to give you a sub segment of payment companies we increasingly are serving crypto native companies so centralized exchanges and other kind of crypto forward fintechs or PSPs. So for them, their need is efficient cross border transfer. Dollars. So in some cases, the customer is moving stable coin into a certain country, and we provide the exchange into, say, Tai bot, and then the payout into the local account. We started on payments many, many years ago, and you'll remember, Simon, I mean, you were there at the ground level. We were serving large banks and had a different kind of product that we were bringing to them. So over time, in terms of payments, we facilitated through digital assets, we've now served $70 billion I think about 40 million transactions. I really think that this next year will be a huge breakthrough for stable coin based payments, and we started to see some really interesting market recognition of that opportunity last year. For example, Stripe acquiring bridge is probably the big moment. But you know, lots of those players were really seeing take up of that use case
Sy Taylor 05:58
when I speak to operators, good friend of mine works over at sling money. Now she used to work a lot in the African ecosystem, and was saying that, like bridge is there, yes, and BV and K and many others, sort of providing connectivity, but ripples right there with Asia Pacific as well. So in this is there a real business, you know, 70 billion of transactions, and 40 million transactions in themselves, 70 billion of volume, 40 million transactions. It's meaningful. That is a meaningful payments business. And now people have started to come around to the idea of stable coins. But what people forget is what you were saying, which is, yeah, but how do I get out of stable coins into local currency? And what does that connectivity look like into that? Yeah,
Monica 06:40
I would say too, Simon, like the use case, the utility of a blockchain as a global payment rail out of the box, fast, friction free, like very low cost. If you're using something like XRP ledger, it's near free in terms of transaction fees. That is obvious. What has been hard in what's taken many years is sewing together the blockchain with the existing domestic payment rails. And part of that is technical, but an even bigger part of that is regulatory. And so that has really been the hard, heavy lifting we've done Brick by Brick over the years. There was a turning point at which, you know, we wanted to be a peer software provider for a long time. And then there was a turning point, which we realized like to really serve the customers, well, we would have to get licensed. We had to enter the flow of funds. So that's been, I think, another kind of key asset that maybe not so well known or appreciated about what we're doing. Well, I'm
Sy Taylor 07:39
a payments guy, right? So I come from that world of going to cybers and going to money 2020, working with those businesses where the last mile is the hardest. With crypto, often the first mile is the hardest, like just trying to use the thing. But with a blockchain, you can get it all the way there, but can you get it to the last mile? And that's a real grind that people people definitely underestimate. And so, yeah, it's kind of a hidden world. So the payments business I now understand, talk to me about custody, because this is you acquired mataco. I believe was it 18 months ago? Two years ago now it's flown by. Oh,
Monica 08:15
yeah, yeah, about 18 months. It's coming up on two years in May. So 2023, such a great business company based out of Switzerland, and they really gain dominance with large banks. So the customers we serve are mostly large banks, everyone from BBVA to HSBC, dBs, I should mention as well, in Singapore, they're a key partner, and the solution is really built bank grade, so everything from the level of security, offering flexibility in terms of deployment model hybrid on prem or full SaaS, and then also a policy engine, so that, especially for these large banks, they can really customize the policies and governance of digital assets
Sy Taylor 09:03
not trivial to customize policies when you're a tier one global significant financial institution, GCP, like HSBC or BBVA. What's interesting about those three names is there's a strong Asia Nexus, but there's also a Latin America Nexus. And as you start to think about where stable coins are strong. It's often outside of the traditional corridors, in those cross border rails. So I can see whether those banks would be interesting. Do these two businesses interoperate now? Is that starting to happen? I know these things can take time. They take
Monica 09:36
time for sure, I would say, I mean, our vision is definitely for the infrastructure to tokenize, store, move, exchange. So some of the primitives we built for the payments business, alongside custody, for that all to work really seamlessly together. I would say we, last year, started to achieve the integration between the technology, but also the go to markets are. Are a bit different right now. So we're talking about with payments, we're looking at more FinTech type companies, and with custody, large banks. However we're seeing the synergy or the opportunity within I feel like the word synergy kind of gets caught in your throat. If you're speaking in a business context. It just doesn't feel right. Yeah,
Sy Taylor 10:21
it's one of those where, yeah, it means something like, there's an overlap here that's useful, and synergy is the correct word. But something about it just feels wrong. I get you. I'm with you.
Monica 10:33
It was abused. It was abused by marketers long ago, and we can't use it anymore anyway. For example, some of those crypto native companies, like a centralized exchange, of course, they have digital asset custody needs, and then they also have some needs that we can serve around stable coin conversion and offering paying, to put it more simply. So yes, there's the opportunities there, and it's coming together, I would say the other thing that I get excited about when we talk to our bank customers who are using custody, they really want us to be their partner or advisor in thinking about real world asset tokenization, yes, the buzziest thing right now, but all those use cases, I mean payments is really foundational to if you're going to be trading tokens, purchasing all of it, you need that infrastructure to create liquidity and then also settlement, to move the assets from account to account. So I think that things that we have built in payments are very foundational for many different use cases that NFI would venture upon. It's funny
Sy Taylor 11:44
how payments off ramping into Fiat was where sort of maybe the last three or four years have gone, and people have now started to see it. Now it's coming the other way, on ramping into tokens from different types of assets that are more digitized or paper based whether they're securities, private credit, whatever is, people have started to get the joke on that, and maybe it's a change of US administration, but having a partner who can help you tokenize that, who's already a service provider makes sense, and advising on that, generally, the hand holding involved with a lot of This stuff is quite significant, not because the banks don't understand this. They absolutely do. It's just difficult, and there's a lot of people that you need to manage internally. So being able to help them do that makes sense. Then the third thing is, of course. RL, USD, this is probably the newest, newest one. Why do you guys get into the stable coin game? What was the reasoning there, and what are your hopes for it? Yeah,
Monica 12:43
so having been facilitating payments for a long time, stable coins became a really obvious need for our customers. So the way we have facilitated payments for our customers in the past is mostly through XRP, using it as kind of a bridge asset, so that the cross border transfer happens really quickly and very low cost. However, independent cryptocurrencies, crypto based currencies, can be volatile, so increasingly customers have desire to use US dollar stable coins. I think the other thing too, because the thing I should mention is the composition of our customer base is a lot of businesses that are not in the United States, so places like Asia, Pacific, Latin America, certainly Europe and the Middle East. But just taking the first two regions, there's a desire for access to US dollars like stable coins. That's a stable coins are very successful amongst crypto users and to do any kind of crypto trading, but also just the simple use case of access to US dollars is a really big one. So for those reasons, we have been using USD stables in our payment flows, in a mix with XRP. So really, it was just recognition that, wow, this is a really big opportunity. You know, there's new, more and more demand for payments through US dollar stable coins, being a provider to companies of that service, it would make sense that we launch our own and also recognition that the stable coin market has been growing, and it's gonna balloon even more, especially seeing RWA tokenization on the horizon, it's gonna only drive more and more demand for stable coins.
Sy Taylor 14:32
You need the cash side of a transaction if you're gonna buy it with something. So what are you gonna buy it? Whether you're gonna buy it with a swift payment or some sort of stable coin. It makes complete sense. And you make a great point that I think sometimes in the US in particular, and somewhat in Europe as well, we get very locked into, well, this isn't useful to me today. But the question is, well, it's not about me, it's who's it useful for and why and when I think that the few customers are in those other parts. Of the world being able to serve them, but also you have some relationships with some banks who could potentially, as Kai likes to say, every company needs a stable COIN strategy, and if you're already acting as an advisor on RWA, every company needs an RWA strategy. And how are these things going to start to come together?
Monica 15:16
Yeah, definitely have seen that demand from some of those banks we work with, I can say, I mean, SOC Gen is certainly forward facing or forward leaning on that they issued a Euro stable coin on multiple chains, one XP ledger being one of them, but multiple chains. So yeah, the kind of more innovative banks are seeing that as something where I like what you said that you need a stable COIN strategy. Every
Sy Taylor 15:40
company needs a stable COIN strategy. Every bank needs an RWA strategy. It's Kai Sheffield. He takes full credit for it. The guy's good at what he does. What can I say? We've had society generally on the show. Previously, they talked about this. We've had BBVA on the show. They talked about their work with visas vtap. I think the European financial institutions probably felt like they had permission because of mica. But in the US, regulation has been a little bit less clear. But considering you're a US based company, there's been a change in administration. What's your readout now as to what the opportunity looks like in the domestic United States for some of these technologies, it
Monica 16:20
feels like the flood gates are going to open this year, doesn't it? So within the past couple weeks, so sod 121, being called back or rolled back and, I mean, within it felt like minutes, you hear from CEOs like Bank of America saying, We're all in. These are institutions that we I mean, Bank of America was one of our early partners when we were doing kind of like the messaging software only payment solution. So we worked with these types of banks for a long time, and the lack of clarity, and, I mean, I think in the more recent time, even hostility toward Hey, using these assets and this technology is not okay. It's dangerous, which is not the best way to handle it, as we would say. But looking forward, I would say, yes, it seems like there's going to be a sea change this year. Even I could say, post November, US election result, even just the conversations, ongoing conversations we've had with banks around being reserve bank or transaction banking partners for the stable coin or for our payments business, the tone and message changed overnight, like it was quick.
Sy Taylor 17:35
The signaling is really powerful, isn't it? Like Nick Carter is famous for talking about Operation choke point. Now, whether that did or did not exist is largely not the point. The tone makes a difference in the business you can do, and the tone is set by the regulators and interpreted by compliance people. And this, there's an old saying that the Bank of England used to govern by its eyebrow movements. And I think this is it's not wrong, like the tone is really, really mattering, but the opportunity there to do something, and for institutions, just for your daily business, to get access to bank accounts, to be able to make payments, to get banking partners, is a huge unlock for just doing business, which was being slow walked before, arguably. So what's your take on where this goes in 2025 there's talk of no more CBDCs in the United States, but there are CBDCs around the world. Are we going to head towards a world where there are some CBDCs, some stable coins, or is that idea sort of starting to look passe, now,
Monica 18:40
I believe that the future will have CBDCs and stable clients. I believe there will be this is borrowing. Chris Larson was one of the co founders of ripple. He's our executive chairman now, but even when I joined the company, I remember he would talk about what's on the horizon is a Cambrian explosion of different types of assets and tokenization of different forms of value. CBDCs, governments, central banks, are never going to seed their sovereignty over money. I think that makes sense, and I think a cbdc could make sense as a digitized system for a given country, I look at the success of pics in Brazil or UPI in India as really game changing for those countries and the people. Um, I mean, obviously that's not a exactly Apples to Apples analogy with the cbdc, but I just kind of mapping inspiration from that. The thing is, so we worked on some cbdc projects with different central banks, and they are, I mean, there's some really key minds within these central banks who are forward looking, but it's going to take a long time. I don't know exactly what the road map looks like in terms of which countries adopt first. Yes, but in the meantime, I still think, even in that future, having stable coins will be a part of the picture, because liquidity and usage, there's a strong network effect to a stable coin that has a broad user base trust in the issuer, and like a lot of liquidity, it's hard to displays. It's
Sy Taylor 20:21
an interesting question of what's backing the stable coin. There were questions about Terra Luna and what was backing that. But then at the same time, there's been questions about tether, but with USDC and a Paxos and an RO USD, the model is a little bit clearer. And so what's backing it? Number one, so what's the credit risk and number two, what's the utility? If the utility is I can move money across dollars cross border, I can hold it in another country. I can off ramp quite easily. Then there's an ideal customer for that product. The ideal customer for that is probably not Bank of America, because they can move money cross borders. They're absolutely fine. But Bank of America and even the FinTech companies in the United States don't have 24/7 access to fed master accounts and the ability to move monies with zero credit risk, CBDCs could potentially, in a wholesale world, give them that. And so the market loves to create these all narratives. It's like CBDCs or stable coins. But the world of payments has always had lots of different payment systems with lots of different people who have access to them, and the amount of money I move via pics is very different to what I move via fed wire, which is very different to something else. So yeah, we love this either or narrative, and it never seems to play out that way. But you alluded to it earlier, stable coins and real world assets, because that's really getting into the institutional space. How are these things overlapping? And what are you seeing from your clients, from the market? Is, is that finally happening? Because this feels like it's been about to happen for at least a decade.
Monica 21:56
Yeah, I think it is coming up on its tipping point. We're seeing it with T bills. So I think rewinding to last year, Black Rocks, Biddle fund has obviously been a success. And then you see Franklin Templeton follow, and many other large asset managers. And what's interesting with tokenizing money market funds or tables that kind of form of asset is the efficiency that institutional markets can gain from posting it as collateral where there's an interest earning instrument now that can be on a real time rail that operates 24 by seven, and whether it's in institutional markets or in payments. You think about corporate treasurers that need for 24 by seven, sorry, to like, rewind the tape of what I'm thinking of you said something earlier of if we're in the US or in Europe even, and we feel like, well, this kind of works for me, you know? And yes, there's definitely parts of the world where the payment systems do not work at all for people, but even in markets across the world, there's these kind of, maybe less noticed pain points of moving vast amounts of money, and it happens a lot outside of the banking hours. So I think that 24 by seven value proposition resonates heavily in the world of markets and corporates and generally, it's
Sy Taylor 23:22
not a relatable problem that I can't move a couple of billion dollars after 5pm but actually that that can make a meaningful difference to your bottom line and your risk as a business. The 24 by seven thing just sounds like, Well, duh, like everything's 24 by seven. Well, wait, it's not. If I'm a global company like Tesla or SpaceX and I've suddenly acquired all of these dollars from around the world or all of this currency. I want to get that into treasuries as fast as possible, because every minute I'm not I'm losing money, and this is when people get the joke of DVP and instant swaps between tokenized treasuries and stable coins is the Oh, it is 24 by seven, and all I need is compatible software and the right licenses. So the the treasury management and some of the direct custody elements of that, like I don't have to send an instruction to somebody who wake up tomorrow to figure out to go do that I can have access to it is it's democratizing what corporate treasury looks like, and the idea of bringing that to more people is hugely exciting. Where are you seeing that sort of take off? Is it more on the institutional side? In the United States, domestically, you're seeing it more with the banks, because I always imagine the corporate treasuries and the PSPS might be the place that would want to do that, speaking to RWAs, yeah, and especially with the treasuries and kind of stables split,
Monica 24:47
yes, in terms of in which markets we are hearing directly from that kind of user, more markets like Asia, Asia and LATAM, I think that that's probably. Because there's also, it's not just the banking cutoff window that they're trying to compete with, but it's also access to dollars plus pricing, so there's bigger pain points. So I think that's why we're probably hearing more from them. I also, I think that more corporates around the world would adopt this technology if it was easier. Like, it's that problem of, I've had enough problems managing my business, I'm not going to go through the trouble of figuring out how to blockchain and enable it. So, I mean, I think that is why a company like ripple, and there's many others in our space who are working on these problems, but like, we got to make it easy and put the software wrap or the licensing, tight compliance controls within the product, so that they don't have to worry about it and they still get the benefits.
Sy Taylor 25:48
Yeah, I think about companies like ramp and brex, and how they've democratized the ability to buy treasuries, but only if you're in the US, like it's kind of a standard feature. What happens if that goes global? And the equivalence of the global bricks, the global ramps and all those guys. I think it can become something that ripple enables for another distributed kind of thing. There's also a question a lot that people are asking about lately, of ETFs. You know, will there be a Solana ETF and will there be an XRP ETF? Like, where do you stand on the opportunity for investors, and is there a likelihood here in the near future? Honest perspectives, yeah,
Monica 26:27
I think that they will more crypto ETFs will be approved this year. I think XRP will likely be, if not the next one, one of the next ones. I think now, like nine different companies have filed for XRP, ETFs, half of which have happened just this month, and especially with the administration change in the SEC. I definitely think this is going to
Sy Taylor 26:50
happen. Yeah, it was going to be an exciting year. I'm going to thank our sponsors, and we'll come right back to this, Monica, because I realized that we've been chatting away now for a good old amount of time when I do need to thank our sponsors. So let's do that. This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at visa, a global leader in payments. Visa's tokenized assets platform vtap uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on chain. Vtap allows financial institutions to issue Fiat back tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in vtap. This podcast is sponsored by our friends at bvnk. And if you've been listening to this podcast, you've probably heard us say, every business needs a stable COIN strategy, and if you're looking for the best place to start, that's bvnk. Bvnk is the leading provider of stable coin payments infrastructure, helping businesses move money faster, settle globally and even launch their own stable coin products, all with licensing and compliance. So you can build with confidence. We're proud to partner with bvnk on tokenized to learn more. Visit bvnk.com alrighty. Thank you to our sponsors, Monica, you've been super helpful so far. But I want to jump in and ask the if you're a bank, what does your digital asset strategy look like? I mean, we hear from Kai very often that you need one, but what does it actually look like?
Monica 28:36
Oh, man, great question. Of course, the landscape of banks is textured and variant, so kind of somewhat will depend, but
Sy Taylor 28:45
there's no one size fits all. If you're a community bank in the US, it's very different to global GCP. And yeah, totally, totally. But,
Monica 28:54
I mean, I think generally, actually, this is great to kind of go back to where we started. So we believe that what blockchain is providing is a modern financial rail, and it's not a flip of the switch. It's not going to just replace all existing rails overnight, and I don't even think for the long term. So a digital asset strategy in 2025 does probably look like first starting with where there can be real, immediate utility that benefits your business, taking us Community Bank as an example, those banks we've talked to them, their pain points are access to correspondent banking, access to being able to even provide cross border payment services to their customers, Even if they can get access, is it at an affordable rate? That makes sense. So maybe that's the entry point for that type of bank. For a larger G SIB bank, certainly don't miss the wave here of digital asset demand, and starting with custody, is an obvious entry point. But looking beyond that, even. And stable COIN strategy, RWA strategy. I think that's the next obvious place for a larger bank to play. And then lastly, I would say, speaking of what was known as Operation choke point in the US, but we know that the way money moves around the world is through networks of networks. And so if I'm a bank, I'm definitely thinking about, how can I be forward thinking of onboarding crypto businesses and serving that type of client to be well positioned as within this network of networks. And I'm thinking back to Signature Bank in the US, and the Signet service that they provided silver gate. There's really interesting players in Europe, like banking circle doing this. That would be very, you know, strategically smart, I think,
Sy Taylor 30:51
yeah, clear bank does a little in this space as well. And I think that ability to be the partner bank means you've got to get your compliance right, and you got to get your fraud and AML stuff right, and you got to be really kind of bringing your A game, because an administration could change, and if an administration does change, then future you is going to really hate that you didn't do that stuff correctly. And that's why I work at sardine it's what we help a lot of organizations with. I think that sort of get this basics right before you move into it is always the thing I bang on about when it comes to strategy, is like, make sure you bake this in all the way through, because I've seen that movie play out twice now, but you talked about starting at custody and then stables and RWA. Stables and RWA look different for different institutions. But have you seen any of the banks start to move into the stable space, even if it's just providing accounts for it outside of Europe. Because I know SOC Gen does it? I know banking circle does it. Have you seen that anywhere else in the world? Is it starting to happen? I think
Monica 31:53
of DBS in Singapore, APAC. So they are definitely more forward thinking in terms of working with crypto native businesses. They have their ddex Exchange, so I think they're probably one of the first large banks to provide a digital asset exchange like that. Thinking down in Latin America, yeah, I know that there's, it's not coming to me top of my but I'm sure there's those examples in Latin America as well.
Sy Taylor 32:22
Yeah. So I know newbank has USDC available to all of its sort of crypto clients. I also thought about Standard Chartered, and they have Zodiac custody and zodia markets. And if you speak to anybody in stables, Standard Chartered is the name that comes up quite often. There's a major player in that stable coin space. So what do you think the next 612 months look like for ripple other than trying to hold on to the rocket as it grows up? Like what's on your to do list for the next 12 months? Is it going to be new products? Is it going to be new markets? Or is it just going to be execution?
Monica 32:55
Primarily execution. What we talked about at the top of the show of bringing together this end to end infrastructure that's going to be our continued path. You know, we've charted it. We're going to just keep marching ahead on it, growth in the business across all those different segments. We talked about ripple dollars. I know we've been talking about it for a while. It just launched in December, and so that's a big area of focus for us, is adoption distribution for ripple, USD, Brad has said this, Brad, our CEO, ripple, is a unique company in the landscape, and that we have a lot of buying power right now, and so certainly look for us to make interesting movements On the strategic partnership, or M A front to advance our mission. Yeah, it's going
Sy Taylor 33:44
to be fascinating to watch. Okay, so I could imagine, as an outside observer, I'm looking at the payments industry with my money, 2020, background going, yep, that one, that one, that one, I'd be, I'd be definitely, to your point about the the last mile distribution. That is something that the payments industry has a lot of but people don't often know where to look. It's a bit of a bit of an interesting game. I want to move into a little quick fire round. What's the one thing everybody gets wrong about ripple that you find yourself correcting them most of
Monica 34:14
the time conflating ripple and XRP
Sy Taylor 34:17
and what are your thoughts on the xLP army. I
Monica 34:21
mean, I think it's a one of a kind community, like very global, very tight knit and really enthusiastic. They're highly engaged, that's
Sy Taylor 34:33
for sure. Where do you think social networks like X play into the future of stable coins and everything else?
Monica 34:40
Oh, interesting. We know that x is working on X money and has aspirations beyond being a social media platform. You know, let's call back to Facebook's Libra project. When you have a massive global installed base of users, I think it makes sense. Think about, well, these users need to transact with each other, with businesses, and with Elon Musk at the helm. We know that he is a crypto native himself. So I think there could be some interesting things happening there. Funnily
Sy Taylor 35:12
enough, you mentioned SAP 121, earlier, and I forgot to say. I wrote it down that I think in the earnings, Tesla reported at least 340 million better off because of that accounting change, because of how it was marked to market. That's meaningful, isn't it? I imagine the same for block as well and others that held it on their balance sheet that but what one accounting change can do accounting really runs the world. Have you paid attention to and what are your thoughts on the AI slash crypto kind of wave of hype that's just been Yeah,
Monica 35:46
in the area that I've probably poked around the most is agent to agent payments, and there's some interesting companies working in that space. So yes, I would say kind of like keen interest. Definitely want to learn more the
Sy Taylor 36:04
see. Here it goes. We did a an episode a couple ago on AI 16 Z and all the craziness, we did our best to try and unpack it and explain it, because it's just a Cambrian explosion there in and of itself, and there's Desi and countless other things happening at the edge. And then meme coins. Where do you stumble? Meme coins,
Monica 36:22
meme coins. Meme coins are a lot of fun, right? People, people have a lot of fun with them. So honest take I initially looked at them similar to how I felt about ICOs in 2017 and I felt like, come on. This is not this is not right. People are taking advantage. These are rug pools. These are not real businesses. I kind of looked beyond them. And then I think, because, I mean, I think the ICO boom made Ethereum like that created this unstoppable flywheel effect of users, adoption, developers, builders on Ethereum, that really brought it to where it is today. And so I think meme coins can serve a similar purpose of creating that unstoppable flywheel effect for different blockchains, bringing mass amount of users and more developers and liquidity and money into the ecosystem. I also think you had some advisories at the top of the show Buyer beware? I would be very thoughtful. I mean, I think there's really vibrant communities out there of people who are connecting with each other, and it's healthy and fun. Yeah,
Sy Taylor 37:34
from the soup of crypto often crawls innovation, even if it looks a bit weird at first, this is very much the case. Last but not least, what have I not asked you that I should have asked you, oh,
Monica 37:45
we've covered a lot of good ground, Simon, what have we not talked about that would be on my mind. One thing a big part of the company is working at this year is just, where does XRP ledger go? It's one of the OG blockchains we talked about that one of its biggest innovations, aside from this novel consensus mechanism, was that the creators created the first decentralized exchange on the protocol itself. Their vision was payments. It was like simply put back then gateway operator issues an IOU onto the ledger, and there's markets created around it, and now this is like a peer to peer system, fast repayments globally. Now, of course, those issuers need to be licensed and all. And frankly, the IOUs are really today, what we'd call stable coins, or tokenized assets, and so we're kind of going back to that original thinking and really leaning into institutional uses of this blockchain. There's lots of non institutional users building on it, but that's in terms of the work we do, the amendments we propose to add new features. It's going to be really mostly around institutional
Sy Taylor 39:01
finance, Yeah, funny how you can come full circle that, like, actually, sometimes the idea is, right, the market wasn't ready, and that's to be it stay the course. Quite fortunately, you've had a business model that's really quite different, that's kind of carried you there to be able to get there, and then that was kind of all I had for questions I asked you, kind of everything I'd ever wanted to ask. So this was awesome, and you just went everywhere. So I really appreciate it. If people want to find out more about any of the things you mentioned, payments, custody, all of that kind of stuff, where do they go and find out more about you and more about some of the products. Ripple.com
Monica 39:41
is the easiest place to go to kind of get the full gamut of what ripple is all about and who we are. I also I'm on X so you could catch me there.
Sy Taylor 39:51
Fantastic. Well, listeners, I hope you've enjoyed this. I've really enjoyed this conversation with Monica. Super open, super easy to talk to. And. And you can find me at sy Taylor on Twitter or Simon Taylor on LinkedIn. And if you haven't already, I've got to remind you to subscribe tokenized on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you enjoyed it, why not leave us a review? It helps us out. Thank you, Monica. Thank
Monica 40:16
you so much, Simon. This is a pleasure.