Today I came across this tweet:
It got me thinking about Ripple again. Ripple is one of the blockchain/crypto companies that have caught my eye since I started doing my research. When you start investigating Ripple it really feels like they have it. They are the only ones working with banks instead of against them and they can move any kind of currency extremely fast, the idea seems amazing. They are working with over 60 organizations already. How can XRP not go to the moon?
But if you decide to investigate more at some point you’ll find out that Ripple and their cryptocurrency XRP are basically two different things and even Ripple cannot explain XRP well.
The tweet prompts us to watch a YouTube video if we want to understand how Ripple works. It's a good looking short video and it does a great job explaining how Ripple works, but notice that once again (as with many of their communication) they hardly mention or touch upon their XRP cryptocurrency.
I've noticed many people asking if Ripple will go the moon and I remembered a few comments I posted on several different posts. Here are some of those (re-edited) comments:
"Ripple and XRP are two completely different things. Ripple is a consulting company and they consult with banks and other organizations. They want to move digital currency from point A to point B. When doing so they give XRP almost for free to those banks so they can use it for transport on their platform. XRP as we know it is the currency that we can buy, but why would we buy it? I don't think that Ripple wants the price to move up a lot... remember that's why they have millions of XRP in escrow so when the price goes to high they can and will dump XRP into the market effectively lowering the price again."
“Ripple is trying to become the only partner all banks need... and banks, well they are heavily regulated and tend to think about maximizing profits. Having a third party means you're paying fees somewhere in the chain. They normally want to have the infrastructure and software solutions in their own hands. While Ripple is claiming to work with over 60 banks/organizations now we don't know what they are doing for those companies... there is still not a clear sign that they will become the new middleman, and thus successfully killing of Swift for example.”
“The Netherlands and the EU are working on their own Ripple-like system and they want to run a pilot somewhere in 2018. Deadline for mass implementation is set on 2019 and in 2019 all Dutch payments will have to be fully executed within 5 seconds. So why did they not choose Ripple because it seems that it is exactly what Ripple can do and wants to do? That's the big question. Maybe they don't like or fully understand what XRP has to do with it, maybe they don't like the fees, maybe they don't want to rely on a third party…”
As stated I hope that XRP will grow exponentially because I have invested in it, but i’m not as sure as I am sure for example about Stratis (see: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@valderrama/stratis-will-beat-ethereum-in-2018).
But as always, no one is all-knowing so I’m very interested in reading your takes/opinions/insights on the Ripple/XRP matter. Please comment down below.