What is The Utility of Blockchain Besides Bitcoin? | Interview With Former Ripple CMO

Moving money anywhere is really difficult right now. It is ridiculous. The people who work at banks and financial institutions are inherently conservative people because we want them to be. On one side there's crypto, there's the speculation on coins and tokens and all that garbage. On the other side there's functional blockchain, the use of blockchain to solve a business problem.

Hi everyone, I'm your host, Giovanni. Today we are going to discuss cross border payments and whether crypto can be effectively used otherwise than a mere speculative asset or as a store of value. I am joined by Corey Johnson, crypto influencer, former chief market strategist at Ripple and currently advisor at Braintrust. Corey, a pleasure to have you with us today.

Glad to be here.

Giovanni, in one of your recent articles you wrote that the excitement over how much blockchain could do has always been outmatched by what little blockchain does do. Can you expand a little bit on that thought?

Isn't it an amazing thing? I mean, here we are ten years after the creation of Bitcoin and yet the functional use of blockchain in just about anything doesn't exist. I think it speaks to some interesting ways that the creation of bitcoin in particular and other blockchain projects really started as, or gave the potential for speculative investment. It made the idea of blockchain spread like wildfire, faster than let's say tcp, IP or software as a service or other sort of important innovations, semiconductors for that matter. But crypto spread faster or at least the idea and the investment in it, but the uses of it still lag behind. So I really, I draw a very strict distinction. On one side there's crypto, there's the speculation on coins and tokens and, and all that garbage. On the other side there's functional blockchain, the use of blockchain to solve a business problem. Strangely, that's still in its infancy. There aren't many companies doing much with blockchain. But I think that is starting to change and you're starting to see some big projects emerge.

That's interesting. So what do you think is the main problem, the main obstacle that has prevented the blockchain technology to find its utility in the mainstream so far?

That's a great question. You know, I think one of the things, there's a couple things. So one thing is the speculation around blockchain in some ways delegitimized blockchain. It made blockchain seem like a place where a technology that drew volatility and speculation and Lambos, right? All these crazy people with their hashtag HODL and and all that, that's not an environment that conservative businesses like say banks want to get themselves involved in. So strangely, that hype around crypto also was kind of a turnoff for big companies starting to put it to use. It's also hard to re engineer processes for institutions that are used to doing things a certain way. So that has been kind of slow, particularly in the world of financial services, which one could argue is the most likely adopter of the technologies behind blockchain.

So when you talk about this whole hype that built up around crypto and kind of also created a lot of noise and probably relatively harmed the industry because it deprived it of a certain degree of legitimacy, do you think that this kind of all part of crypto, of the crypto world is kind of going away or do you see it still present right now?

So I don't want to overstate it, I just don't think it helped. Right. But I think that also the hype around blockchain and Bitcoin and the price volatility and let's imagine that the lousy journalism, the lousy journalism of people on tv and I believe me, I used to be a lousy journalist on tv, so I know of what I speak. But the journalism that would say, look at this thing, it's up and to the right, I don't understand it. Look at this thing, it's down and to the right, I still don't understand it, never did understand it. Let's move on. That kind of surface level, trying explanation or lack of explanation that really kept people from understanding what the technology is, never helped the technology move towards further adoption. But I do think slowly but surely you start to see that adoption from a handful of companies. You mentioned Ripple, where I used to work, Ripple's having some great success selling software to banks, software that uses blockchain technology to move payments across borders. Very interesting. I'm working with a company called braintrust, which you mentioned in the intro, that is also using crypto, using blockchain technology to solve the problem of providing very high end workers who can manage innovation remotely for big companies that can't seem to hire those people full time. And it's using blockchain to pull those people together and build a network, a decentralized network of high end tech users where the users actually control the network. That's the kind of thing that's only possible with blockchain. But it's been really hard for those projects to get off the ground. It's taken quite a while. If you want to go back to the sort of first Satoshi white paper that launched bitcoin and launched the world of blockchain, but we're getting there.

So I would like you to expand a little bit on what are the most useful use cases of blockchain technology that are already present in the market, according to you. What are the main use cases that have the most potential to become really adopted by big businesses and so and so forth.

So the first place I think is going to be finance because moving money anywhere is really difficult right now. It is ridiculous. I just had a conversation with the U.S. comptroller of the Currency, Brian Brooks. This is the guy in charge of regulating over 1000 banks and financial institutions in the United States. One of the most powerful people in the Treasury Department. And he specifically talked about how slow it is to move money. That if you want to move money from the US to Europe. If I want to send you money, Giovanni, or better yet, if you want to send me money, it takes three days to clear the money's at risk during that entire time because of systems that we're using were built in the 1970s using cryptocurrencies. In the case of XRP and Ripple, of course I'm biased there. I used to work at that company to be sure. But using Ripple to move money across borders, it happens in moments and the currency risk is virtually non existent because it happens so quickly. That that's a true innovation that can make the world work more smoothly and more safely and more quickly. And those are the kinds of places I think you're going to see a lot of innovation in the crypto world.

Yeah. So that's something that I wanted to ask you. Why do you think in the traditional legacy financial system the cross border payments are still so slow and expensive?

So this is a great question and believe me, when you're trying to sell a software solution, a solution that you know is better for the banks and for the remittance companies and for the customers, why aren't they buying it quickly? Banks are slow to make changes. Banks are inherently, inherently conservative operations. The people who work at banks and financial institutions are inherently conservative people because we want them to be. Because when you put your money in the bank, what's the most important thing to you? That you can get it back? That it won't change? That it won't deflate in value? That. That it won't get lost? That they won't steal it? The entire notion of a financial institution is to protect and keep things immutable and unchanged. Right. So when you try to provide a brand new technology and software solution to an industry like banking, it's literally the last one likely to do it. Maybe outside of the church. Right. Who is least most resistant to change is a financial institution. Now, that's bad news at the start. My hope for companies like Ripple and other companies selling the financial services is that while it's bad news at the start because it's hard to get in, it's also hard to get out. It's a real moat around those businesses because they don't like change, they're unlikely to change. And once they make a change, they're unlikely to change again. So I think that's why we see systems such as Swift so deeply embedded maybe 20 years after their technological advantage is gone. And we might see the same thing with software solutions and indeed software solutions like Ripple.

Do you think that the Coronavirus pandemic can provide an opportunity for new breakthrough in blockchain development? And if so, how?

Yeah, so 100%. So one of the things, and I actually spent a lot of time working on this in the last couple weeks. One of the things that we're finding from work, from home, and it's really interesting is that programmers in particular, technology people, people involved in computers and math, when they work from home, they are more likely than a lot of other workers. And economic statistics have proven this out. Labor Department of Labor statistics from the US have proven that workers who work from home tend to work on other projects on the side, particularly technology workers. Technology workers studied in 2005, about 5.3% were working on side projects. Ten years later it was about 7%. That's a meaningful increase. But that's before this Coronavirus. With Coronavirus, we've got programmers working at home. So I went through and actually interviewed many programmers throughout the US about what they're doing at home. And what they're doing at home is cheating on their bosses. They're actually working on other jobs for other companies or freelancing on the things that they want to be working at. I talked to a programmer at a. I promised I wouldn't use his name, but he's at a $24 billion publicly traded company. He programs in Java because they pay him to program in Java. But he's fascinated with blockchain and so on the side now that he doesn't have to commute. And as he puts it, I don't have to waste time on human interaction. I don't have to tell people about how my day was the night before. I don't have to talk to people, go out to beers with him after work. I can just work all day. So he does his job for part of the day and then he freelances writing blockchain code on the side. What we've seen, if you go to GitHub and look at the commitments of blockchain code and open source projects, those are increasing dramatically during this COVID 19 crisis. So what we've seen during a global quarantine and global work from home, global shelter in place, whatever you want to call it, we've seen a lot of creation happening in the world of blockchain and we're seeing what might be many years of innovation all pulled forward into 2020. The other place we're seeing a lot of that is in work from home. We're just seeing that all of the things that were necessary for remote work, in particular company policies. Companies that used to say, look, BrainTrust is a company I'm working for. It's the reason I've been thinking about this a lot and doing some research on this. But at BrainTrust we're offering high end programmers to blue chip corporates who can't find those programmers. And one of the things the corporates would sometimes tell us is, you know, we really want to get those machine learning programmers, those python programmers, those TensorFlow programmers, those artificial intelligence programmers, those project managers, those graphic designers. You've got these great freelancers, we love to use them as a company, but we can't because we have a policy that our IP stays in house. You can't work from home. If you want to work on this secret project, you got to work in our office to do it. Those rules are gone. So now you've got as companies dropping the veil, finding ways for workers to work from home. A process that was happening over time is now happening really quickly in 2020. And, and what we're finding is these corporates are flocking to brain trust, using a blockchain protocol to build a network and reward the people on the network. And the workers are getting to do that work they were prevented from doing by corporate policies until this COVID 19 process happened. So it's fueled by blockchain and it's fueled by COVID 19. Strangely, where we're seeing a lot of innovation in 2020 that might have taken five or ten years otherwise.

Thanks for being with us, Corey. That was very cool.

Thanks man. Anytime.

That was Cory Johnson, entrepreneur and advisor at Braintrust. As always, if you enjoyed the interview, don't forget to smash the like button and subscribe to our channel, Cointelegraph.

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