Ripple has maintained an arm’s length distance from XRP’s performance in the cryptocurrency market, but it is covering ground in terms of XRP adoption. XRP recently received native support on Coil via Bitpay, a development which would enable massive adoption of the third-largest crypto not only for people trading in crypto, but thousands of businesses as well. Despite XRP’s growing adoption rates however, regulatory concerns are still looming over the project.
Despite such regulatory concerns, Ripple’s Senior Vice President of Product, Asheesh Birla, thinks positively of the securities law prevalent in the United States. In an interview, while discussing the ICO and SEC fiasco, Birla said,
“I believe that securities law is very much a good thing for digital assets. You’re not going to scale this industry unless you have the proper regulation.”
The ICO craze took over the market in 2017 and subsequently, various projects raised money using tokens. However, 40% of these projects were run by fraudsters who ran away with the raised amount. The ones that lasted have lost almost 80% of their value and the SEC’s clampdown on the companies conducting these ICOs in the US has “killed the ICO market,” noted Birla. The world has moved on to the phase of tokenization, one where illiquid assets are converted into liquid, for example, tokenizing real estate.
Birla said,
“One use case that comes to mind is tokenizing real estate, which is typically very cumbersome to buy or raise money for. And if you can make something tokenized and liquid, you can then think about derivative products on top of that.”
However, the Senior VP appeared bullish on this concept and spoke of a smart contract factor to govern asset trading, like equity. With this feature in place, the legal team wouldn’t have to venture into dealing with stock transfers. Instead, it can help the product team in making way into new markets, with Birla claiming that we may see this in the future.
