Xpring, Ripple’s XRP-focused investment arm, while continuing its strategic acquisitions for expanding XRP’s use cases, faces a new set of challenges to transform global payments. Ethan Beard, SVP of Xpring, was recently interviewed by Abra’s Bill Barhydt to discuss some of the challenges in developing an ecosystem of XRP-related companies.
Sharing an interesting use case, Beard compared the cross-border payments landscape with the gaming ecosystem’s in-app purchases. He speculated that the main reason game developers offer bulk purchases is that it costs them huge transaction fees. He sufficed this statement by saying,
“The way that the current financial system works over existing rails is that it doesn’t work for Epic Games (Fortnite) to charge my son a dollar because it probably cost them 30 cents to swipe a credit card. So they, in essence, make him buy $25 worth of virtual currency.”
In a similar scenario, XRP’s ecosystem (instead of fiat currency) will allow game developers to enable smaller transactions, and according to Beard, it will eventually shift the business model of the gaming industry “from (only) selling virtual goods to buying and selling virtual goods.”
Addressing Ripple’s inclination towards the XRP token, Beard said,
“We at Ripple and Xpring, while we think that XRP is really great as an exchange of value, we are not XRP maximalists.”
The entrepreneur also shared Ripple’s vision to improve interoperability between various crypto-wallets, “as XRP is really important as the bridge currency” that can facilitate desired liquidity. Steering the discussion towards Facebook’s Libra initiative, Beard speculated that with the influx of tech players into the payments landscape, transaction costs will eventually go down to zero.
