DeFi
Building the Future of Financial Infrastructure with Blockchain and Digital Assets | Ripple
Ripple was founded on the belief that blockchain would become the global financial infrastructure of the future, enabling more affordable financial services for more people and businesses around the world. Early on, we bet on the promise of institutional DeFi to create a better, fairer financial system, but at the time, crypto and blockchain largely lacked the infrastructure, liquidity, trust, and regulatory clarity needed for widespread institutional adoption. To put this into perspective, Bitcoin (BTC) was under $20, Ethereum didn’t exist yet, and there were only a handful of exchanges with a few million dollars in volume per year.
Fast forward 10 years and the first BTC and ETH spot ETFs Cryptocurrencies have been approved in the US; BlackRock has launched its first tokenized fund issued on a public blockchain; the EU is rolling out comprehensive crypto rules with MiCA; and financial institutions and payment companies like Fidelity, Itau Unibanco, Stripe, and PayPal are making it easier for their customers to trade, hold, and use crypto assets. Needless to say, the cryptocurrency market has come a long way, as has the broader acceptance of cryptocurrencies.
As the industry and market continue to mature, Ripple has evolved alongside it to meet the opportunities that lie ahead. Having worked with financial institutions for many years, we have repeatedly validated blockchain’s promise of faster, cheaper, and more reliable financial services. But they need a simple, reliable, and trusted digital asset infrastructure to integrate blockchain into their businesses. Just as there are key components to running an internet-based business (storage, compute, networking, etc.), institutions need on-ramps, off-ramps, custody, and liquidity.
With these foundational elements, those building the financial services of the future can create, store, exchange and move value around the world to solve today’s real and pressing problems, and imagine and invent tomorrow’s possibilities.
Evolution of the Ripple product range
The first use case we addressed was cross-border paymentsby leveraging the XRP Ledger (XRPL) and its native system XRP digital asset to move value seamlessly. XRPL’s out-of-the-box capabilities (speed, low cost, transparency, and scalability) make it an ideal tool to address the challenges inherent in traditional financial systems.
Payments were an ideal entry point, given its obvious problems (high fees, slow transfer times, lack of transparency and high error rates), based on decades-old technology. Today, our cross-border payments solution, Ripple Paymentshas near-global coverage with over 80 payment markets, representing over 90% of daily FX market coverage, processing over $50 billion in volume.
While we continue to view payments as the first (and most proven!) flagship application of cryptocurrency, Ripple is now about much more than payments. We provide financial institutions with a simple, secure, and compliant digital asset infrastructure that dramatically improves how these customers create, store, exchange, and move value.
An important step in making this future a reality was the Metaco acquisition in 2023 – a digital asset custody technology provider serving leading banks around the world including BBVA Switzerland, HSBC, Société Générale – FORGE and many others. We are now better positioned than ever to execute the product roadmap for our clients globally, and going forward, Metaco will be known as Ripple GuardWe continue to grow the childcare team and operations, as well as opening a new office in Geneva (coming soon!) to accommodate our growing childcare footprint.
We also decided to integrate our Liquidity Hub product with our payments solution, bringing together the benefits of both offerings in a single experience. Ripple’s experience in building a payments business and mastering how to deliver liquidity to the right destination, at the right cost, and at the right time has taught us a lot about liquidity management. We are applying the lessons we learned from our experience to our customers’ experiences.
Bridging the gap between TradFi and Crypto
Earlier this year, we announced our intention to launch a stablecoincalled Ripple USD (RLUSD) on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum blockchains. This is a significant milestone for Ripple’s business and an important next step in bridging the gap between traditional finance and crypto. Once Ripple USD is launched, we plan to integrate it with Ripple Payments, alongside XRP, to meet growing customer needs and evolving use cases for cross-border payments.
We spent years building a global payment networkwhich allows customers to withdraw funds in the destination and currency of their choice. Alongside other stablecoins, Ripple USD will enable efficient on-ramps and facilitate fast, low-cost global payments for many of Ripple Payments’ customers.
XRPL is the blockchain of choice for Institutional DeFi Use cases due to its reliability, high performance, low transaction costs, and speed. Institutional DeFi requires high-quality stablecoins for scaling, trading, and more. Bringing trusted stablecoins to XRPL from companies with a compliance-first mindset opens up new capabilities, use cases, and users for more DeFi developers. XRP remains the universal bridging asset for XRPL and is particularly useful for creating liquidity for long-tail assets. For example, in regions where the cost of moving money across borders is particularly high due to the lack of liquidity between currencies, XRP remains the most effective.
XRP Ledger: Built for Business
XRPL remains the primary blockchain on which our products are built because it is fast, highly efficient, field-tested, and supports large-scale use cases. Since 2012, it has processed over 2.8 billion transactions without failure or security breaches.
It also has a number of very sophisticated financial tools built into the protocol level, such as its decentralized exchange (DEX)XRPL was the first blockchain to feature a built-in DEX, allowing users to offer and trade any type of token without a middleman or centralized exchange. Additional features (like automatic bypass And Find your way) allows users to find better deals by finding trades with multiple tokens in a row.
Ripple, alongside many projects like Zoniqx, Financing the orchestra, CredeFi, Sologène, Archax and many others, are building applications on XRPL to bring TradFi into the modern financial toolkit. Over time, we see an opportunity to integrate more of the sophisticated technical and financial features of the XRP Ledger directly into Ripple’s business, bringing the benefits of decentralized finance to our customers around the world in a secure and compliant manner.
Crypto Building Blocks for Enterprise
Ripple has proven its longevity by weathering the storms through every cryptocurrency bull and bear cycle. Since day one, we have taken a long-term view and deliberately focused on working with financial institutions, regulators, and policymakers to transform the existing system from within.
Our ambition is to become the leading provider of digital asset infrastructure for financial services. We envision being a one-stop shop for companies that want to benefit from the advantages of integrating blockchain into their business, but do not have the expertise, resources or interest to build and maintain the technology in-house.
Ripple is one of the few players in the industry uniquely positioned to provide a holistic digital asset infrastructure that bridges TradFi and crypto thanks to our years of experience in both worlds. Ripple has the credibility, reputation, trust, advanced understanding, and operations for core services like crypto on-ramps and off-ramps, liquidity, custody, and compliance. And we will continue to evolve our product suite to deliver the solutions our customers want and need.
We entered this business because we believe that blockchain technology and digital assets can provide faster, better and cheaper financial services than existing technologies. We will continue to provide best-in-class solutions, combined with innovative technology to bridge the gap between TradFi and Web3 to make this vision a reality.
Contact our team to find out more and Start building your blockchain business today.