Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse: XRP Ledger solves ‘Bitcoin’s scalability problems’

Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, recently has been making numerous public appearances in order to fill in the general public about Ripple’s position in driving the crypto adoption. In this latest interview with the Economic Club Of New York, Garlinghouse explained that cryptocurrency  is still at its ’emerging’ stage. He added,

“Blockchain technologies,  digital assets, and cryptocurrencies are going to touch a lot of different industries. But I think we are still figuring out what those look like.”

In fact, the entrepreneur argued that the surrounding hype of the ecosystem has exceeded the reality given the fact that the entire crypto ecosystem’s market cap has been reduced to just over $200 billion as compared to its peak of $800 billion. On the other hand, the underlying technology has been finding new applications within other business verticals. For example, Garlinghouse pointed out how Ripple replaces the need of a ‘trustworthy’ middleman (such as today’s banks) to facilitate cross border transactions. The entrepreneur highlighted Ripple’s position in such a scenario,

“Anytime you have a middleman facilitating a transaction, they’re susceptible to how blockchains can enable two parties to transact without trust, but with certainty because there’s this immutable record out there, right? Ripple is applying and using this open source technology, the XRP Ledger, to solve the cross border payments problem.”

Moreover, Garlinghouse also stressed on how the XRP Ledger solves ‘Bitcoin’s scalability problems’ due to its 21 million market cap. He further mentioned that Bitcoin’s proof of work requirement makes transactions expensive, and contrasted the idea with XRP’s consensus algorithm that does not require “mining to verify a transaction.”