Inside RIPPLE

Okay, so my first question for you is, when I came in here, I asked to go to the bathroom and the very first thing I saw was a sign in the bathroom stall that said, fast fact, Ripple is not the same as xrp. And then a small explanation.

Really?

Yeah.

See, I've not been to the ladies room. I wouldn't know that.

Ripple, whose digital asset XRP has bounced up to briefly become the number two cryptocurrency twice already this fall, has its headquarters in San Francisco, California. Ripple owns 60 billion in XRP, with 55 billion of that currently locked up in escrow. So as working here, would you consider it a corporate environment?

This is a very different environment than I've worked in in the past. What really got me is my first few weeks here, I'd go to Le building and I go to hit the badge. You can badge in right when I was badging out. There's nothing to hit. But I realized what really goes on at this company is the focus is on getting your job done, not keeping attendance. You know what your objectives are, you know what your key results are supposed to be for the quarter. And that's entirely our focus.

What's it like here? What's the office like here?

Well, you know, so it's classic Silicon Valley open. Engineers gonna work whatever way they want to work. These are competitive days. You gotta make your workplace fun or people are gonna wanna work there. We've got these corporate values, right? Lego.

Yeah, right.

Leg it, enjoy it, get it done, go for it, own it. It's fun to work with people who want to hustle and get stuff done, but also kind of hold each other accountable to finish that work.

So I noticed in your interview, one of the things that you said that needed to happen here is about investor protection, regulation. You said specifically, we need more investor protections and they can't come enough. Could you elaborate a little more on that?

In the long history of finance, as long as there have been sort of new ways to make money, there have been crooks who show up to try to steal some of that money. And we certainly see it in everything. We saw it in atomic energy, we saw it in the oil and gas sector way back at when. We certainly saw it in the dot com era. We saw it in subprime financing and we've seen it in the world of crypto. We've seen these, these really sleazy offerings that look like they're not actually trying to start businesses, but just separate people from their money. The SEC has stepped in. Investor protections have emerged all around the world for this. But it can't happen fast enough because it makes it harder for those of us who are pursuing legitimate technological solutions, using these technologies to do the things we want to do when there's all these kind of bad things happening on the periphery.

So one thing I've noticed about just coming up to the office here is that you're surrounded by banks.

Right down there is where it was the first bank of America building. Before that was called bank of Italy. It was founded by A.P. giannini. The plaza behind this is A.P. giannini Plaza. Now he changed into bank of America and its headquarters stock. And so it's kind of cool that we're sort of building the future of banking and banking software right here in the space. The XRP ledger is decentralized because no organization or individual has any legal right or ability to control it. Every participant enforces every single rule, and the system is governed by all of its participants.

David Schwartz, a rather unlikely cheerleader in any other sense, considers himself a cheerleader for the XRP ledger.

I think while proof of work has kind of proven to be a dead end and hasn't produced any technological innovations of any significance, nor has it's produced actually increasing centralization in the systems based on it, there's a lot of work to improve the decentralization and improve the robustness of systems based on distributed agreement protocols. Historically, the XRP ledger, as the stakeholders have broadened, has become more decentralized and the influence of any single participants has reduced. And we would expect that only to continue over time. It's really clear to us that XRP is not a security, and XRP's relationship to Ripple is proof of that. But maybe more importantly, you've also got xrp. You can buy all the XRP you want. It doesn't give you the rights to a dime of the company's profits or earnings per share or dividends, doesn't give you a single share or any interest in the future of this company. And God forbid, if this company were to go away, it would be a very sad day for the Johnson family. But it wouldn't make a bit of difference to xrp. XRP continues to exist separate from the company Ripple. And so for that reason, I think when the SEC takes a good hard look at this and we know that they're starting to do some of that work, they're going to recognize, I suspect, that XRP is so clearly not a secure.

So what do you think the environment is like working here at Ripple as Opposed to banks. I mean, basic things like, do people have to come here at 9am? Is there a dress code? You know, how does it change from working at Merrill Lynch?

We are driven by what we have to get done, not how you do it. So if you want to do it in flip flops or you want to do it doing wingtips, it doesn't really matter. We use a measure here called okrs, which is a kind of standard Silicon Valley metric for knowing exactly what your key results, your objectives and key results would be for the quarter. So every person who works here, everyone has a list of OKRs, and if we all meet these goals, the company will proceed towards success. So importantly, we've got three products, right? So we've got X Current, which is our oldest product in the market, the longest, X Rapid, which is fairly new to the market. And then xvia, very, very new. And so I expect our rollout would be most of it will be X Current, a little bit will be X Rapid, and even less will be EX via. Over time that might change, but initially the oldest stuff gets the most traction because customers had a chance to look at it the longest and get used to the idea more quickly. So similarly, what countries are they going to go into? I think they're going to go to those places where they're ready for a change, but where there's some actual use. So if you look, for example, we just did some announcements around some partners who are going to be trading, who are already trading in xrp, in US, in Mexico, Philippines. Now, India and China have banned the use of crypto in most cases. But in Mexico and the Philippines, those are countries where there's a lot of remittance payments going out of other countries and into Mexico and the Philippines. And there's a lot of trade in xrp. So I think we're going to see a lot of adoption of our products in those countries. We're already seeing that.

Okay, so I also noticed in the sign on the bathroom stall that you guys have yoga classes.

Yoga classes happen in here.

Apparently you have like the free stuff.

It's Silicon Valley writ large. I'm a big fan of the grapefruit. I go through half a dozen a day. When they find out this stuff is bad for you, I'm toast. But, you know, I think it's expected in Silicon Valley. You know, you're here, you work all day, you work all night, you're here early, you stay late, at least. Free water, free snacks, we have meals together. We think that what we're doing is really important. We think that, you know, you can just be cynical and say we're making software for banks to lower their costs of doing business. Or you can think about all of the businesses we're going to enable. You can think about all the people who work hard to send money home to their families, only to give up mostly in fees to banks. When it comes to moving money across borders, we've been pretty focused on just that for some time now and I think it's given us a head start.

So I saw this thing on Reddit where a Redditor commented saying that he had this idea going on, something Brad Garlinghouse said, where Ripple should have a person carry cash physically from New York to London and see if it can beat Swift, you know, door to door. Is that something you guys would ever want to test out?

Fundamentally, the fastest way to move money is put in a suitcase right now. And that's ridiculous. And that's the age that we live in. And frankly, the biggest problems are not from New York or London. The biggest problems are you're going Thai baht to South African Rand, or if you're trying to move money from Japan to Brazil. I mean, these are places where a lot of commerce happens, but it takes a very long time to move the money and it's really slow and there are a lot of errors. That's ridiculous. In an era, I mean, you and I send text messages to friends overseas in seconds. You send an email with an attachment with an Excel spreadsheet with all kinds of important data in seconds. But it takes days to move money. That's crazy. And that causes businesses to lose business and it raises the cost for individuals moving money back to their families.

There's three floors. So how often does everyone get together?

That's important. There were two floors only a few weeks ago. We are growing like crazy. Got offices all over the world, literally here in San Francisco, in New York, in London, in Luxembourg, in Mumbai, in South Sydney. We've got joint partners in Japan. It's a global operation. We're really trying to focus on the places where we can provide help with our software. It's a fun place to work and we're trying to make sure it's a fun place to work because we want to bring the best and the brightest. This is kind of trippy. The golden ratio, alright, so it's symbolized by phi, this Greek symbol. But the golden ratio is. It's a math. A plus B over B. When it equals A over B is what? Well, it's about 1.661-809897. If you pull out those geometric differences in those circles, you end up with these Fibonacci sequences organized a different way. You start to see network structure, where you've got hubs and you've got less important hubs in a network. And so out of that, we create a logo called the Triskelion, which is our ripple logo. But it really does come out of that mathematical principle of the golden ratio.

Cointelegraph, like subscribe and huddle.