Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple: One on One with the Man Running Ripple and XRP

Brad Garlinghouse is the CEO of Ripple. In this conversation, we discuss what Ripple does, how XRP is related, the current progress to date, and Brad answers a number of hard questions crowdsourced from Twitter. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Brad Garland House is the CEO of Ripple. In this conversation, we discuss what Ripple does, how XRP is related, the current progress to date, and then Brad answers a number of hard questions that were crowdsourced from Twitter. This conversation has been highly anticipated, so I want to make a few things clear upfront. Brad participated in this podcast episode without he or his team reviewing my questions beforehand. There was no payment of any kind that exchanged hands, and the episode has not been edited

• 0:42Anthony Pompliano?

  in any material way other than the removal of prolonged silences or filler words like "uh" or "um." When I agreed to record this episode, I figured that both supporters and detractors of Ripple or XRP would be unhappy with the final product. That is okay with me. I spent quite a bit of time preparing for this interview, including talking to people from both sides, along with crowdsourcing a lot of questions that people wanted answered. I hope you listen to this episode with an open mind and walk away thinking the conversation was fair and balanced. Either way, I hope you enjoy it. Skrt skrt! Wanna know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: motherf***ing mass adoption.

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check out blockfi.com/pomp. Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today. If you follow Bitcoin and crypto, you've probably heard of eToro. They're the world's number one social trading platform, and I love it. They've got more than 10 million other traders that love it, too. And guess what? They just launched in the United States. eToro offers access to the world's most popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others. With the smartest trading tools and the ability to connect with the best traders around the world, there's no better place to build your perfect portfolio. If you're new to Bitcoin and crypto, you can test the waters with their $100,000 virtual trading feature.

• 3:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But if you're more experienced, you can create custom technical charts and use eToro's social feeds to inform your trading decisions. They've got transparent fees, and so you never miss out. They also have an easy-to-use application available on iPhone, Android, or any web browser. You can get started today in just a few clicks at etoro.com. Again, that's etoro.com. Get VIP access to Bitcoin and crypto markets today. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment

• 4:20Anthony Pompliano?

  or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Super excited about this episode. I think we broke the internet before you even got here. I've got Brad here, who we are going to try to get through a whole bunch of information. And hopefully, when people leave here, they will understand his perspective on how Ripple XRP works. Kind of let him describe where they are from a progress standpoint, answer all of the haters and the detractors online.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  And the lovers.

• 5:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And the lovers. Well, we'll get to the XRP Army, who, as I, in preparation, was thinking, you must be the commander of the XRP Army.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  I'm not sure. Well, I definitely don't consider myself the commander of the XRP Army. I'm not sure. There's a few people who maybe probably contend for that position. I'm not one of them.

• 5:17Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So let's start from the beginning. You actually have a life before Ripple, which some people may not realize. You've been in the technology sector for a really long time. Yahoo, AOL, etc. No, experienced.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Getting off a tough start.

• 5:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Experienced. One of my partners is mid-50s, and when we go through everything, I always say, this is our experienced partner.

• 5:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about AOL and Yahoo. Kind of give us a quick overview. What'd you do at each one? And we talk some of that experience.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  I'll start with Yahoo, just because I think for me, that was a really formative experience in lots and lots of ways. I joined in early 2003 and was there till, I think, the beginning of 2008 or 09. I can't remember which, anyway. And it was a great experience, probably because that was, you kind of joined, you joined in early 2003. That was kind of a dark period for a lot of internet companies, and certainly I would have put Yahoo on that list. And just both measured by stock price, but also just engagement. And then, you know, new leadership was coming in. And, you know, we went through a kind of a golden time at Yahoo, where a lot of growth, and it's hard for, I think, today's Younger generation to realize, I mean Yahoo was Google of 2003.

• 6:29Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  And that was an awesome experience. Had some great mentors professionally, ran a whole bunch of things at Yahoo, ranging from the homepage to Yahoo Mail, to Flickr, and a handful of other things. And you just learned a lot as a leader and manager. One of the highlight slash interesting experiences there was I ended up becoming a little bit infamous for something called a Peanut Butter Manifesto.

• 6:57Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  The Peanut Butter Manifesto was a document I wrote, it was an internal document that I wrote. It did leak out after about 10 weeks, but the articulation was basically like Yahoo had a problem of spreading itself too thin. And I think this is true, not just at Yahoo, but many companies suffer from the, almost an identity crisis of who are we, what are we trying to be? And if you try to be all things to all people, you're not going to be anything to anybody. And I think Yahoo is struggling of like, hey, are we going to be a search company? We're going to be an email company, we're going to be a content company, and news, and sports, and fantasy. And there's eventually manifestations of this, but the internal characterization, we talked about, excuse me, internal characterization, as we talked about the budgeting process.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And a senior person referred to that as, well, we spread it around like peanut butter. And to me, it was this like cringe-worthy moment where I'm like, that is exactly the problem. You know, if you want to be great at something, let's decide to be great at that and then over-invest in that, and potentially at the expense of other things that maybe we have to divest or exit, or whatever. But as the internet grew holistically, you had specialization and expertise. And if we were going to compete with Google in search, which I know people probably hear that and think, how is that even possible? In 2003, that was really possible. 2004...

• 8:09Anthony Pompliano?

  The whole page, if I remember correctly, Yahoo was like one of the most visited, if not the most visited webpage in the world.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  On the internet, yeah. For a period of time, I don't, I mean, it was when I was managing it, and it was certainly a high point of kind of, you know, thinking about programming and a lot of interesting stories about kind of, you know, things that transpired in those eras. But yeah, it was a different time than it is for Yahoo today.

• 8:31Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so you go from Yahoo AOL timeframe to... You then become the CEO of a technology startup. And when I was doing much of prep work, it was a file sharing startup.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I'm assuming that that kind of forays into some stuff you're doing now. But maybe just tell us a little bit about what you guys were doing there and kind of, you know, what drew you from the larger kind of tech corporations to something that was a little bit smaller and fast growing?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Well, I've always kind of viewed myself more as a startup entrepreneurial guy. Before Yahoo, I had been the CEO of a small voice over IP company, kind of early days of VoIP. This is pre Skype. And so I knew that going from Yahoo to an early stage company was probably in the cards. You know, anytime I'm thinking about a career shift and my counsel to anybody would be think about long term trends. And I think one of the things that was pretty maybe overly obvious in 20, I think it was 2011 when I was joining the company at the time. It's called You Send It. We rebranded to Hightail. But cloud based file management, you know, again, now it's like, okay, everybody's using that all the time. That was actually kind of new in 2011. And You Send It had a pretty extensive user base.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  And the idea was, you know, and it was a bit of a turnaround because You Send It had kind of reached its kind of high point, if you will. And so how can we offer additional services, expand that? And I think, you know, things went reasonably okay there. We continued to grow it. The challenge is when you've got, you know, the Microsofts of the world and Googles of the world entering the space with kind of either a loss leader or for free. And certainly having Dropbox and Box as competitors, it was a really tough slog. And ultimately we had an opportunity to sell the company. It did. It did end up selling to a company called OpenText. But I exited and, you know, decided to take some time off and look at what's next.

• 10:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so then you pop up again in the crypto world, right? Kind of after that time off. Let's start with kind of what's the first time you remember hearing about crypto, blockchain, Bitcoin, some other, you know, application of technology? Like, do you remember what that was and kind of what caught your attention?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  There's a conference that's kind of under the radar that gentlemen Orin Hoffman and Peter Thiel organize each year called Dialogue.

• 10:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Dialogue?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  And I attended Dialogue a bunch of times, but in 2012, I attended Dialogue with a number of friends and there was a session on Bitcoin and on the flight home, sitting with some of these guys who often are referred to, you know, some of these guys are patient zero for many of Silicon Valley's Bitcoin energy. And by the time we landed, I was like, okay, okay, okay, I'll buy some Bitcoin.

• 11:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What year is this?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  2012.

• 11:13Anthony Pompliano?

  2012, okay. So real early and kind of that nucleus of people who now most people know are excited about it.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, you know, this is with Wences Casares, Mickey Malka, a good friend of mine, Dave Goldberg, he passed away, but you know, remained friends with those guys. The thing that I probably was unconvinced of in that era was what's the long-term opportunity of Bitcoin in a world where it's fighting against governments and fighting against banks and fighting against the institution, the man? Now, obviously, that's part of the genesis of Bitcoin, but I was always kind of, you know, I often wonder, okay, if you took a slightly different strategy with these things, would you reach broader adoption? Would you impact more people more quickly? And when I had not heard of Ripple, I got a recruiting call and, you know, we kind of got one thing led to another.

• 12:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So basically, your kind of first foray was Bitcoin and more of what I'll call like the crypto ethos, if you will, and then inbound recruiting call ended up kicking off the process for Ripple?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's kind of a

• 12:16Anthony Pompliano?

  That's amazing.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of a colorful story and, you know, so you'll maybe find it interesting.

• 12:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  I had left High Tail, I had time on my hands, and so I decided I'd be an Uber driver. I thought that would be fun. So I drove an Uber for about a month and one day, a recruiter who I happened to know, not super well, but knew him, I remember partly because he kept trying to call me and I kept hitting ignore because I had a passenger in the car. Anyway, I finally spoke to him and he says, you know, have you heard of Ripple? And I lied and I said, yes, but tell me what it does again? Anyway. So he describes what Ripple is trying to do and the kind of internet of value and payments. And the honest reaction, I said, look, super interesting. I'm not your guy. I'll give you some names from PayPal or Visa. You know, my sense is that's kind of more up the alley of what you're looking for.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  And in what he said, which I think is somewhat true is that Chris Larson is one of the co-founders of Ripple. He's like, no, he's really looking for someone. If you want to change an industry, it's easier to do it a little bit from the outside perspective. And then if you hire someone from the industry, it's harder to achieve that same outcome.

• 13:18Anthony Pompliano?

  From the time that you got the call till the day you quit driving an Uber, how long was that?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Well, I knew that wasn't that long because I didn't drive Uber very long. That was a one month project, but that was a fun experience and a whole different, for a different interview, for a different day.

• 13:34Anthony Pompliano?

  San Francisco is probably one of the only, you know, Bay Area, San Francisco is probably one of the only areas where the people who are driving for Uber could have previously had some crazy other life. And then in the future, could next day be running a technology company?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were a couple funny moments. I mean, so one, this is 2014. And I was, I was an early Tesla driver, and so I was picking people up in my Tesla as an Uber X. And a lot of people at that time, particularly had never been in a Tesla. So you pick people up and there'd be this kind of, oh, you know, holy shit, wait a minute. And anyway, a couple of people did figure out who I was and they would tweet about it after the fact. But it was rather amusing.

• 14:11Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. All right. So let's dive into Ripple first. You joined in 2015 as a CEO?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  As COO.

• 14:20Anthony Pompliano?

  COO. Okay. What drew you to Ripple eventually? Kind of what was the lore, if you will, as to why to join this one company out of all the companies in the Bay Area?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Well, it's a good question. I interviewed a bunch of different companies at the time. And I think, you know, for me, given where I was in my career, I was less interested in kind of how do I take a base hit or a double? It's kind of like, look, if you want to do something, I would really have an opportunity to, borrowing a Steve Jobs-ism, put a dent in the universe. And there's a whole lot of things in the kind of whatever web 2.0, web 3.0, whatever we're in, where I look at the thing and I'm like, wait, this isn't that. I mean, it's kind of like, oh, could you, as a capitalist, make money? Sure. But you know, a better marketplace for dog walkers, I, it doesn't speak to me. Like it doesn't speak to me as like you're changing and impacting the world in a positive way. And I'm not taking anything away from those that have a more efficient dog walking experience.

• 15:16Anthony Pompliano?

  The dogs are happier.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  The dogs are happier. And by the way, the dog walkers are, you know, there's

• 15:20Anthony Pompliano?

  They more money.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not, I know, I'm not trying to be a hater towards that, but when I look

• 15:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Brad Garland House is a dog walk hater.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  There was a rumor at Ripple for a while that I hated dogs and we know it's allowed to have dogs at work. And it's not, that's wasn't true either, but anyway. Uh, so I, as I was looking, you know, I wanted to do something. I felt like this really, if it works, could really have a big impact. And so my risk tolerance might have been higher than some. And, you know, I had been talking to the team at Uber about our position there. I'd been talking a couple of other things and I was drawn to Ripple in part because it felt like, it was, it was a big swing, meaning that, you know, there's a chance that it was going to be, it wasn't going to work. And there's a chance like, well, wait a minute. Actually, if this works, it could be a really impactful in a lot of ways. And, you know, I think through a little bit of luck, a little bit of skill, you know, I think we find ourselves in a pretty interesting spot.

• 16:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't want to jump that far ahead.

• 16:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, no, well, for those that don't know, there are, um, at a high level, two separate components to what you guys are doing. There's Ripple and there's XRP. Uh, I want to make sure that we separate those and talk about each one individually first. So Ripple, um, when somebody says to you, what does Ripple do? How do you respond and kind of describe the business from your perspective?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Well, I usually respond by, uh, I grew up actually in the Midwest in Kansas. And I explained to people that when my mom asks me what I do, I say, mom, we sell software to banks.

• 16:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Pretty simple.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Pretty straightforward, not a lot of drama about that. The fact that the software we're selling includes components of blockchain technologies, includes solutions that leverage digital assets.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  She doesn't, I mean, at the end of the day, I'm not even sure customers care. And I think one of my critiques of the crypto ecosystem and before the show, we were talking about this conference in Montreal last weekend, which we can talk more about. But, you know, I think there's this echo chamber of people getting so excited about the technology, we lose sight of what problem are we trying to solve for, what customer and how are we going to do that and how do you go to market with it? And I think, I think one of the things missing in the crypto ecosystem is really a customer fixation. These are profound technologies and I think can impact lots of industries in lots of ways. But, you know, when I sit in these conferences, sometimes I hear people talking about, and frankly, kind of geeking out about different technical things. I think, you know, okay, that's interesting, but if you don't think about the problem

• 17:40Speaker 01

  you're trying to solve, and there's a kind of Silicon Valley statement of, you know, are you a technology in search of a problem or a problem in search of a technology? I think with Ripple, we were clear about what problem and how we were going to apply this technology. One of the first things I did when I joined Ripple, there were a number of different projects going on. We had Codius, which is a smart contract platform. We had something called Global Identity, which is intended to be leveraging a blockchain, leveraging the XRP ledger for identity management. And then there was this payments solution. And one of the hard decisions early on, you know, back to that peanut butter reference is we're a small company. We cannot pursue all three of those things and be successful. Let's pick one. Did we pick the right one? I don't know.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  You know, this is pre Ethereum as the smart contracts platform and Vitalik and our CTO at the time, a guy named Stefan Thomas were close and actually Vitalik was staying on his couch and they were talking about smart contracts platforms.

• 18:34Anthony Pompliano?

  There's only a couple hundred people at that point that are into all this stuff, right? So they all knew each other.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  It's a pretty small community. Yeah. Anyway, you know, we decided to focus on, you know, payments as a solution and liquidity as a solution for financial institutions. And again, I, you know, you can never know, is that the right path? But I think that focus of going very narrow and very deep has served us well. I think there's a lot of people in the industry who've gone wide and thin, where there's a lot of experimentation, but not a lot of traction and clear demonstration.

• 19:05Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So, one caveat I should put out in the conversation, which I was somewhat clear on Twitter, but I think is important for listeners to know. I actually know very little about Ripple and XRP. And so I've got what I'll call a basic understanding of what I could Google around and learn about. So I was excited to do this because, one, I get to learn from the source. And then, two, is to try to get a counterbalance view of the world. I reached out to a bunch of people, tweeted a bunch of times saying, "Hey, send me all the questions, send me all the questions." So I think I've got a much more holistic view. But my understanding of what Ripple is today, in terms of products, and I want you to kind of gut check me to make sure this is correct, is there's three separate products, right? There's X-Current, X-Rapid,

• 19:49Anthony Pompliano?

  and X-Via are the ones that kind of came up from all the research online. One, is that an accurate portrayal of kind of the different products? And then, two, can you take us through each product and what they do exactly?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Sure. So, that is a reasonably fair characterization.

• 20:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm sure I don't get it perfect.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, part of that is, anytime you're in a nascent industry, it changes quickly. Even X-Rapid as a product name, we're kind of evolving to something we call just on-demand liquidity, because that's more descriptive about what it does. But that's not that critical for today. So, those are the three products. I'll talk briefly about them. X-Current is really the idea that banks today use existing pools of liquidity, so pre-funded accounts. If I have the Bank of Pomp and the Bank of Brad, you can be Mexican pesos, all the US dollars. I would pre-fund Mexican pesos at your bank, and you would pre-fund dollars at my bank, and then we would use SWIFT to debit and credit that. With our first product, X-Current, you can do that much more efficiently, much more quickly, than how the current system works. And not surprisingly, banks like that. That's good.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And so, we have had adoption of X-Current. But to be clear, and I think one of the things that there was misunderstanding about years ago, is that doesn't touch crypto. That is, you know, we describe it as kind of a temporary blockchain between two endpoints. That's a private transaction. It's not going to be published. You know, banks and financial institutions have sensitivity about their transactions being broadcast everywhere. But that's the first product.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  The second product, X Rapid, which we now really call on-demand liquidity, is this idea that I don't have to pre-fund to the Bank of Pomp. I don't want to put Mexican pesos out there. I don't really trust the Bank of Pomp. And increasingly, I don't want to have truly, there's trillions of dollars pre-funded in accounts around the world. If I, as a bank, don't have to pre-fund that liquidity out into the world, I can use it for other purposes. Now, there's a whole bunch of things to go with that. You know, one is if I'm funding the Mexican pesos reasonably stable, but if I was, let's say, the Argentinian peso. There's a lot of currencies out there that you don't want to hold. And if you hold them, you're going to try to hedge them. On top of that, you have things like quarterly compliance requirements about how's the Bank of Pomp doing.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I've got, you know, it's frankly, one of the things that changed after the financial crisis is something called, I forget the name of it off the top of my mind, they changed the regulatory framework, Basel III. Basel III changed the regulatory requirement about how banks' tier-one capital ratio is calculated. It used to be that the Bank of Brad could trust the Bank of Pomp, and the Bank of Pomp and your regulators could trust the Bank of Brad. After the financial crisis, we realized we don't trust other banks. So my deposits that I have at the Bank of Pomp no longer count towards my capital ratio. So when we talk about tier-one capital, that no longer counts. Well, guess what? That means the Bank of Pomp and the Bank of Brad, I don't want to have those accounts out there because it means I've got any more liquidity elsewhere.

• 22:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's because if I can bring those back in rather than keep them at your bank, then they count towards my capital?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  That's correct. Or I can dividend that money. I can do whatever I want with that money. It's my money.

• 22:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And I don't need to hold it on my end in order to still use for transactions? Like, I don't just, rather than hold it at your institution, I just now hold it at mine for the transaction?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's what, so that's what, this is what on-demand liquidity solves. So with on-demand liquidity, or X Rapid allows you to do is say, Bank of Pomp holds a dollar. I'm going to sell the dollar, I'm going to buy a unit of XRP. I'm going to move that unit of XRP from a US-dollar-denominated exchange to a Mexican peso-denominated exchange. I'm going to sell the XRP, I'm going to buy a Mexican peso. You can have that whole transaction completed in seconds. What today would mean pre-funding and debiting, crediting, and you know, you're wiring in it. If you're a financial institution, you might be sending liquidity in every 10 days or something. Now I can payment by payment, or even if it's treasury, I can not pre-fund $10 million a week. I can send, you know, $100,000 every four hours.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  And I don't have to pre-fund, so that allows me to bring working capital back to me. There's payment providers out there. Some of these are public companies, so this isn't proprietary information. But MoneyGram has negative working capital to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars of negative working capital.

• 24:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Because of these pre-funded accounts.

• 24:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  If they don't have the pre-funded accounts, all of a sudden, they have a lower, I mean, by the way, I'm not pretending we're going to solve this overnight worldwide. But over time, if we can bring that from a few hundred million to 200 million to 100 million, you know, the enterprise value of MoneyGram is somewhere around 1.5 billion, debt plus the equity. If you can move that by a couple hundred million dollars, that's actually really material to a business like MoneyGram's. Now you extrapolate that to not just other remittance companies, but banks. It's a very big deal for how global liquidity is managed and the impact, frankly, to the global economic engine. We make global commerce more efficient by making payments more efficient. If we can do that at scale, we can make the whole economy more successful.

• 24:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the question, well, let's go through Xvia next, and then we'll get into the XRP and kind of how that works.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  I'll keep Xvia super simple. Think of it as a corporate API wrapper so that a corporate can write to one API and shoot off payments globally.

• 25:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and this is all over, one of the other terms that kept coming up is RippleNet?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 25:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that something separate than these three products?

• 25:13Speaker 01

  No, those three products represent RippleNet. So when you connect into RippleNet, you're touching those three products.

• 25:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So if I am a bank, can I buy one product and not the other two, or do I get kind of all three wrapped up as one offering, if you will?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  From a technical point of view, the way we deploy it is you're kind of getting all the pieces. That way, if you've signed up for X-Current and you want to add on to X-Rapid later, or on-demand liquidity later, it's an easy evolution. But you can sign up for one product.

• 25:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And am I, as a bank, Ripple comes to me, salesperson or customer person, and says, hey, we've got this product, here's how it works, here's the advantages, etc. Do you want to use it? I'm paying to use that product. Are you taking a transaction fee? Is it an upfront payment? Like, just how do I interact with Ripple as a company?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  We have an enterprise sales force the way, I mean, back to my kind of, we're an enterprise software company. So we have enterprise salespeople out traveling the world, meeting with banks, other financial institutions, and we're signing contracts with them. You know, we've been pretty-

• 26:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Like a traditional software contract?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, traditional is loose here. I mean, it's not, Salesforce, you just light up an instance. This is not that, right? You're deploying, typically deploying behind the firewall.

• 26:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  And so, you know, generically, you know, without disclosing all of how our contracts work, you know, you're paying a software license fee. You're typically paying a professional services fee for deployment costs because again, we're typically sending people to your location to do deployment work. And the third is transaction fees.

• 26:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So kind of like the first two sound similar, like an IBM type model, right? Give or take. You don't have to say IBM, but somebody like IBM, sure.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Enterprise software.

• 26:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Enterprise software. And then there's a, basically some sort of revenue you guys derive from how much is used or the transaction volume that somebody participates in.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay. So you described earlier that some of the products use XRP. Let's switch gears from Ripple to XRP now. What is XRP? And I think this is where a lot of the controversy lays probably. So let's be really kind of thorough in terms of how you would describe it and kind of what the purpose is.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  XRP is an open source software, XRP Ledger is open source software. The XRP is a digital asset resident on the XRP Ledger. Some of the founders of Ripple were involved with the creation of the XRP Ledger. The XRP Ledger started before Ripple, the company was created.

• 27:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, explain this. So some of the people from Ripple involved in the creation, but XRP Ledger was actually started before the company Ripple?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  So sequentially, a group of engineers gets together and, you know, candidly, some of these engineers had been early Bitcoin engineers. Their view was, hey, there's going to be some scalability limitations of how Bitcoin works. They set out to build a better Bitcoin. I think, you know, in impressively prescient way, they saw, look, if you extrapolate this out- And you really want this to be the future of payments. Can you scale a proof of work like model to be to enable an internet of value? And that's that's challenging. So they were like, and I think they would attest to their original view was, hey, we're going to set out to build a better Bitcoin. We're going to build Bitcoin 2.0.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  And, you know, we don't talk about that today because I don't view this as a competition between Bitcoin and XRP. I don't view, I mean, I think there's going to be multiple winners in this.

• 28:36Anthony Pompliano?

  The internet will take care of that competition.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:39Anthony Pompliano?

  They definitely see it.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  The marketplace will take care of the competition. Meaning, you know, it's not going to be the chatter of the echo chamber of Twitter and the crypto world. It's going to be customers, you know, is this solving a problem for customers? I just point out, look, I think one of the areas of FUD is people are like Brad hates Bitcoin. I am long Bitcoin. I own Bitcoin. I am not bearish on Bitcoin. I just don't Bitcoin is not going to solve a payments problem. So the Satoshi white paper says a payments network. It's not going to be a payments network. And the reason is that the nature of proof of work and from a scalability point of view is significantly limiting. How, you know, the throughput, transaction time, transaction cost. The XRP ledger is much, much, much more efficient.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  I typically say it's about 1,000 times faster per transaction. It's about 1,000 times cheaper per transaction.

• 29:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the questions, and we're kind of jumping around a little bit here. So if you're listening, bear with us. One of the things I think that Bitcoiners would say is there's a relationship between security and speed. And if you speed up the transactions, then you could be giving up security. Right. And so there's some level of trade off there. Agree, disagree. Do you think that there's a kind of a more gray areas, not so black and white? And just how do you think of, you know, the trade up between speed, security, Bitcoin and how XRP works?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  I'm going to intentionally somewhat dodge the question. Okay. I mean, like, I've read that meme and it's kind of a recent meme, in my opinion. I didn't hear that two years ago. And now I've kind of read stuff now and people say that. The XRP Ledger has existed since 2012, I think 2012. We've never had a transaction unwound. We've never had a hack against the Ledger. Like, so do I think we have compromised? Do I think the creators of the XRP Ledger compromised security to the benefit of efficiency and speed? I don't see it. I'd like to see the data that, I mean, again, I've read that, I have read that meme, but I've never read it. And, you know, here's an example of where there's a,

• 30:47Speaker 01

  people optimized for speed and efficiency, but then there is a security issue.

• 30:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I think it's a fair point for you to say, hey, look, this has never been hacked, in generalized. I think that there's probably other people who have tried to increase efficiency, therefore given up some security, and there has been a hack. And so maybe a fair critique of that would be if it happens one place, doesn't mean it's going to happen everywhere. And also, what level of security is needed, right, in order to run a system? And if there is a relationship between security and speed, is there some middle ground between the two? Right?

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess I'm just, I'm challenging the premise that there's a trade off between security and speed. I'll be totally candid. Part of what I'm dodging the question is like, I am not the cryptographer at Ripple who's going to-

• 31:40Anthony Pompliano?

  We're in the same boat.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So, you know, I'm a little over my skis and trying to defend this point, but I think I'm reasonably smart about this stuff. I have read the meme that you're trading off security for efficiency. I haven't seen any proof of that. The people who I trust the most from a technology point of view in this area, I think if they were on your show, would argue that.

• 32:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  I don't feel competent enough to do that.

• 32:04Anthony Pompliano?

  The Twitter detectives, go to work.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Go argue about that and you can tweet at me about how I'm wrong. But tweet at Joel Katz on that also and he'll defend me.

• 32:14Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fair. All right. So XRP is a digital asset that goes on the XRP ledger, right? And then describe kind of how it works into the product itself because it sounds like it's not all three products within the RippleNet actually use XRP. Some of them do, some of them don't. So just kind of.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Well, the only product that we are selling to customers that uses the XRP ledger is on demand liquidity.

• 32:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Right. So I was describing the bank of pomp selling, I can't remember if you were a dollar peso, but you're selling whatever that fiat is, you're buying XRP, you're moving it, you're transacting back. If you're just going point to point on fiat, you're not touching XRP.

• 32:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And so some of the pieces here, I think are, one, banks do this with fiat, it's slow, there's a bunch of issues, there's the deposit issue, that stuff. Two is then somebody would say, well, why don't you just use Bitcoin or some other digital asset instead of XRP?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  That is a great question. I know I'm interrupting you, but if I may, we had a really interesting debate internally when we were architecting and kind of product design around X rapid or on demand liquidity. And one of the debates internally was, wait a minute, what happens if we're launching on demand liquidity into Poland? And there is, I think it's, well, maybe let's not use that because I think that's the Euro. Let's use Peru. I think it's the Lira. You know, to be honest, I'm over my skis on that, too. If we're going into a market where there's no liquidity with XRP, then our product isn't going to work. So we architected the product to be flexible enough to say, look, maybe ETH has a ton of liquidity into Peru. Maybe Bitcoin has a ton of liquidity into Peru.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  The point here is we were focused on solving the customer's problem. If that meant that we were using Bitcoin to solve it, okay. So we made the product flexible enough that it would use the most efficient rail. Now, it happens to be that we have never used anything other than XRP because actually XRP is extremely fast and extremely inexpensive on a per-transaction basis.

• 34:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you look at it as XRP is the default? And then if there's not the liquidity, then you would go to the other ones, right?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's the right way to think about it. Yeah.

• 34:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  By the way, the reason why I'm emphasizing that is back to you even, I can't remember what you said earlier, but you're talking about what I heard was kind of this, there is religions. Around all things crypto.

• 34:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Tribalism.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Tribalism, religiosity, whatever, you know, and I think it's really unhealthy.

• 34:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  I

• 34:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I just had somebody on who said that toxicity was positive. So go ahead, go.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know who that was, but I, I look, and I, I got this, I mean, I thought this conference I was at in Montreal is supposed to be super confidential. I saw an article about it, Modern Consensus. So apparently it's not that confidential. But one of the things I argued in front of this kind of hundred people is I don't think what Ripple is doing is competing with almost anybody else in that room at that point. And I'm sure there are examples of people we're competing with, but I want them to be successful. I want the ETH projects to be successful. I want the Bitcoin projects to be successful. I don't view that as a bad thing for us. In fact, the more successful they are, the better it is for me. In fact, when I hear about companies in our space that are struggling and might have a bad outcome, that's bad for me.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  I think we're at a stage and, you know, I joined the internet space. We didn't get back to my early, early time, but I moved to Silicon Valley in 1997. This is, you know, a year ish past the Netscape IPO. It was early days and I feel very similar, like, look, all boats can rise here. And when I hear about the tribalism, the toxicity, I'm not here to hate on almost anybody. What I, I'm here to hate on people who aren't open minded and thoughtful and are, you know, maybe almost pedantic in their approach. They're just like, this is better because I want to solve a customer problem using a set of technologies that includes the XRP ledger, that includes the digital asset XRP. I think we're doing that effectively. We're scaling very quickly.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  It's going well. I would think other people would want to root for that success because I think we're the only scaled, scaled blockchain crypto solution out there. Period. Full stop. There's a lot of experiments.

• 36:15Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that you're the only scaled, say it again?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  I think that what Ripple is doing is the only scaled example of crypto and blockchain being used like at, at scale. Period.

• 36:28Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you measure?

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Let me qualify that because I know the Twitter is gonna go berserk on that.

• 36:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I just tried to save you for the record. So how do you, how do you measure that?

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Well. I mean, so first of all, I'll back off by saying, look, clearly Bitcoin as a store of value is a use case I believe in. I'm long Bitcoin. That is working. It is scaled. What I'm talking about more is that enterprise solution. There's a lot of experiments around how blockchains could impact different kinds of transactions. I use the word experiments really specifically. I can't point to other examples where, I mean Ripple has hundreds of customers using these technologies to solve a real problem. We have real volume. You know, we can get into some of that volume information, but like, things are going really, really well. I want these other projects to do really, really well.

• 37:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's get into progress, because that's a huge question that people have just, and I think this is coming both from the believers and the detractors camp of just like, where are you guys today? So hundreds of customers. My understanding is some big names, some small names, everyone in between. What kind of data can you share in terms of, you know, kind of milestones or data that illuminates what that progress has been?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Right. So a whole bunch of thoughts I'll throw in here. One is, so we have publicly disclosed, we have over 200 customers. I don't think we've updated the number since then. You know, we have-

• 37:52Anthony Pompliano?

  You can update right now if you want.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  I don't think I know the exact number. At some point, and I'm not trying to be tongue in cheek, but like you stop counting at some point, it's just like, are we at 248 or 260? I don't know. What I have also publicly shared is that we have been on a pace of signing about two enterprise-grade contracts per week.

• 38:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  So what that basically means is you have 52 weeks in a year. We're signing on average about 100 contracts. We'll sign more than that this year. We beat our forecast for Q3 that just ended last week. And, you know, that's a leading indicator of increased adoption. I'll tell you one interesting kind of anecdote. We were at Cybos, big banking conference in London a few weeks ago. And meeting with a bank we don't work with today, big transaction bank, correspondent bank, and the team there was sitting down and one of the guys in the room said, well, it's become a question of not if we're going to work with Ripple, it's when, because 26 of their correspondents are already working with Ripple.

• 38:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  So if you're this bank and you're not working with Ripple, it actually is inefficient for them not to actually join the network. And this is one of the reasons why I got excited about the business model. The network effects, you know, Metcalfe's Law, the value of network expands based on the square of the nodes on the network. We're seeing that happen. You know, the thing that the skeptics should ask is, well, if you were one of the first five customers to sign up for RippleNet, why would you sign up? It's like the first person bought a telephone, there's nobody to talk to, which is true. I tell my sales lead that his job gets easier day by day, and like, there's evidence to show that it does. Now, translating that traction with a customer contract, and one of the first OKRs, which is how we kind of manage objectives and key.

• 39:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You're using Silicon Valley language. You're going to get them all messed up. OKRs are basically like key performance metrics.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Perfect. When I first got to the company, our kind of key performance metric was contracts. And over time, I realized that the contracts wasn't the most important metric. It was deployments, because you can sign the contract, but if it's not deployed within some reasonable amount of time, you haven't made that much progress. Then we started tracking deployments as the most important metric. And then we realized it's actually not deployments, it's actually volume. Because at some point, you want to sell the contract, deploy it, and then you want volume going over, either in a new use case being built on a new rail, or moving existing volume over to that rail. So today, the key metric we track more than anything else is volume. We track primarily volume by number of transactions as opposed to dollar volume.

• 40:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  And the reason is, like, to some degree, you could do a small number, we have a handful of customers that are, you know, corporate use cases, where there's one large bank, where their average transaction size is tens of millions of dollars per transaction. That kind of skews all the other data, because you have other transactions like $30 each. Ultimately, we think about the number of transactions, the number of transactions has been doubling quarter over quarter for about eight quarters.

• 40:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Give us a ballpark of where...

• 40:51Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 40:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Thousands, millions?

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Many thousands. We're not yet, there's a chance we'll hit millions this year.

• 40:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Millions per quarter or millions per year?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  There's a chance we'll hit, there's a chance we'll hit millions this year.

• 41:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So millions in one single 12 month period?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:09Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  I know, I mean, there's a couple of things on, you know, why we're kind of protective about what we disclose. One is, these are banks. These are financial institutions. Like, I don't have permission to share, you know, they get rather sensitive when I start sharing specifics about their transaction bank. It's confidential information to them.

• 41:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I will, I'll let you off the hook to a degree with one question that I saw from Twitter, and I forget who asked it, so I apologize. But you get credit, this is my credit to the Twitter user, is, they said, what percentage of the customers? Right, so they basically said, look, I believe that you sign up all these customers, right? It's very obvious that if you have a better software product to give to them and can help them run their business, duh, they're going to pay for it. It's just classic business. But what percentage of the customers have more than 1% of all their volume going through

• 41:56Anthony Pompliano?

  a RippleNet type engagement or product versus 99% going elsewhere?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  By the way, I think that's a good and interesting question.

• 42:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I thought it was.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  It presumes that I know their total volume.

• 42:08Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fair.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Which I would imagine typically we don't know.

• 42:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Now, I mean, there are some customers where, I mean, let's, let's use MoneyGram as an example. It's very public that they're working with us and what have you. Right now, we're only live in, you know, two corridors.

• 42:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Mexican peso and Philippine peso.

• 42:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  So my guess, I'm purely just conjecture here, and they're a public company, so somebody could probably figure this out. But even if we had 100% of their volume live in the Mexican peso and Philippine peso, what percentage of the total would that be? I don't know. I mean, my guess is those two corridors, Mexico is probably a very, very big percentage of our business, meaning, well, but big meaning maybe 20 at most, maybe 10, I don't know.

• 42:48Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think, let's just take that as an example. What do you think your volume in Mexican peso is in terms of compared to them using RippleNet versus not? 50/50?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  It's less than that now and ramping. And the reason why that's the case is we are slowly increasing. One of the key things we talked about earlier is you need liquidity between XRP and MXN.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  So one of the challenges, I think, for the whole crypto world is I've been fond of saying that the long-term value of any digital asset will be derived from the utility it delivers. The utility for most crypto today is purely speculation. Now, we could argue that that's a step forward from illicit use cases of Silk Road. And so we've gone from illicit use cases to speculation. I think the next chapter will be all about real utility. But if today 99.9% is speculation, I have said, you know, look, we want to get all crypto from 99.9% to 99 to 98 to 97, what have you. There have been days over the last handful of weeks where 80% of the volume to XRP and MXN was associated with our on-demand liquidity product.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  So we went from 99.9% to 20% being speculation. Now, that actually creates a different problem. The problem that creates is if there's not enough liquidity, can we push more value through that pipe unless there's more liquidity? And so we work with market makers and to some degrees, liquidity begets liquidity. If there's a market there, market makers, whether in all shapes and sizes, will participate and hoping to kind of generate their own value from participating there.

• 44:27Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so last question around kind of just progress. As you're signing, let's say, two contracts per week on average, right? You're kind of doubling the transactions quarter over quarter. Things appear, you know, based on that data, kind of going up and to the right. Where are you finding a bank that is kind of the average customer? What is the value to them, right? In terms of you've got these three products, are they coming in and saying, hey, I'm actually using all three of these as part of RippleNet and I kind of get the full experience? Do you find that they're just using one of the three more than the others? Like, what is the, I guess, kind of the value proposition that the average customer is finding today?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  I'd say 90% of the customer's first touch point is for X-Current. Because it's solving a problem that they, it's... It's easy to kind of explain the value proposition. You already have two pools of liquidity. You're using some sort of solution to settle between those to for messaging. This is a better way to do that, and that's the entry point. Once we are at the entry point, then we can say to the bank of pomp, hey, you have, you know, you have a correspondent in the Philippines. Your, the cost to maintain that correspondent is whatever. Hey, there's a better way to do that. Let's find a more efficient way to do that. And, you know, oftentimes, you know, people first hear the word crypto. There's a little bit of a, particularly in the banking world.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Once you explain to someone that every ripple enabled transaction is KYC'd. Every ripple enabled transaction is checked for AML, OFAC, you know, other acronyms filled in. All of a sudden they're like, oh, okay, this is just, this is better, this is a better way to facilitate liquidity. I think that the posture for banks changes pretty quickly. If you don't mind, I'll tell you one anecdote on this. It's kind of funny.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  About two and a half years ago, a very senior guy from a big correspondent bank with whom we were working says, hey, Brad, you know, look, we're super excited to be working with you. I just want you to know that this whole, like, they were using X current. And, you know, he took it upon himself to say, look, we love what we're doing, but just so you know, like, we're never going to use crypto for liquidity. Okay, I get you. Thank you. You know, we're thrilled to be working with you. Happy place. Eighteen months later, same guy and the CEO of the entire bank come to visit our office in San Francisco. And what they said is, hey, we're ready to start talking about how you can help us with liquidity. What was interesting to me about that is, you know, we had the opportunity to talk to them about how they can use XRP for liquidity because we were already a trusted partner in solving a problem for them and how they already worked.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  And I think that we keep kind of breaking down those walls, and I think that's good for the whole crypto community, by the way. Dispelling the idea that crypto is inherently somehow, you know, used for illicit purposes and those things. You know, I think it's talking about real use cases, solving real problems, having real utility, I think is good for the whole industry.

• 47:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is a great segue because another set of questions, and this came from a whole different group of people, and I kind of distilled them down into a couple of bullet points. Was

• 47:28Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the big things that I think Bitcoin specifically gets both praise and detraction about is its lack of ability for law enforcement or governments to stop it. Right? So there's a lot of people who love the fact that, hey, you can't censor this stuff. You can't seize it. You know, all the, all the things that we, you know, believe that Bitcoin brings to the table. The flip side of that is there's a lot of people who don't like that. Right? Hey, there's economic sanctions.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Governments don't like that. It's not a lot of people don't like that. Governments don't like that.

• 47:58Anthony Pompliano?

  There's plenty of people, right? And so there's a whole set of questions. I kind of just put this under like law enforcement and governments. And so things like, you know, how does Ripple deal with government requests about user information or account blacklisting? And the things that I think people say that's not possible when it comes to Bitcoin? How do you guys handle that? Have you guys had those requests? Maybe just kind of elaborate on some of those issues. Skrt, skrt. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right. Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that

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• 50:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Go check out blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. How does Ripple deal with government requests about user information or account blacklisting and the things that I think people say that's not possible when it comes to Bitcoin? How do you guys handle that? Have you guys had those requests? Maybe just kind of elaborate on some of those issues.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Well, I'll start with a rather simplistic answer. We don't. We don't onboard customers. The Bank of Pomp does.

• 50:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  If the government wants to come and look at a transaction for the Bank of Pomp, they go to the Bank of Pomp, then nothing changed. So I mean, I mean, a little bit overly simplistic, but the way that the Bank of Pomp is regulated today, whether they're using Ripple's technologies underneath or not, doesn't change.

• 50:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  So when they want to come and, this is for Ripple.

• 51:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  If they want to come and validate a, I can't remember the exact example you were using.

• 51:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's say that I want to, I'll give you two examples. Let's say that I'm a person of interest to the government and I send a transaction to somebody. It goes through RippleNet, XRP.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Well, it goes through a bank.

• 51:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Or a regulated financial institution.

• 51:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And my transaction.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  To another regulated financial institution.

• 51:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. And the government says, I want to learn more about that.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  They go to the bank.

• 51:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm assuming that they send you guys requests as well or no?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  I mean, we, we don't necessarily have the, you know, back to the privacy of, you know, we sign a customer. We don't necessarily have that information. Matter of fact, not just, we don't necessarily, I'm trying to think of an example where we would have that information. If the Bank of Pomp's transaction to the Bank of Brad. I, you know, I don't get the identity because I didn't do an onboarding.

• 51:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So basically the way, and this is me learning here for a second. There's two ways that these systems work, right, is there could be, I don't want to call it shielded because I think that has a negative connotation, but basically this idea that Bank of Pomp sends money to Bank of Brad, the processor of that transaction can see personally identifiable information, it can see all the details, the transaction, who it is, all that kind of stuff. And then there's a way for it to basically happen without any sort of information being shared from the bank to the payment processor. Which bucket are you guys in?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  The latter.

• 52:28Anthony Pompliano?

  The latter, okay.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  I mean, but both endpoints, the Bank of Pomp, and maybe I shouldn't say the Bank of Brad because I am Ripple, but you know, both endpoints see the information and they have access to the information. And we actually, one of the things that we do through RippleNet is make the passing of that information much more robust than how Swift works today.

• 52:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  The banks like that. And frankly, governments like that. You know, this idea that, independent of my own political views, this idea that crypto is going to kind of take down governments might be for certain segments appealing. I think about this a little more pragmatically. How do we apply these technologies to bring greater efficiency to commerce, to greater efficiency for the immigrant who lives in, you know, San Jose, California and wants to send money home to Guatemala and 30% of their transaction is coming out in fees? Like, that's shitty. You know, that doesn't need to be that way.

• 53:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You're, you're basically saying, like many companies in crypto for sure, hey, there's rules, there's regulations, we are going to play within the rules and regulations.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Fair.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Well, but the only thing you said there that I didn't necessarily agree with is like many in crypto. Well, I think one of the challenges is a lot of people in crypto, I think, are doing a disservice by, you know, championing things that we know that governments aren't going to be on board with.

• 53:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, and part of it too is right, it's always a balance between, somebody's got to break the rules to change the rules, but at the same time, if you break the wrong rules or you do the wrong things, then there's punishments, right? And so it's kind of, I've got, you ready for this? I got a saying that one of my partners says all the time. He goes, pioneers end up in ditches.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Well, look, I also think there's a difference between, you know, I can, on a personal level, I can look at what Uber was doing and kind of disrupting the taxi union and think, okay, like, I get it. You know, when you start talking about the disruption of, let's say, the intentional circumvention of KYC requirements, you know, I know there are examples and, you know, with governments that maybe aren't to be trusted, and you could argue maybe the US government isn't to be trusted. We live in a world of governments. That's not going to change anytime soon. We do a kind of an annual customer conference called SWEL, and a couple of years ago, actually, exactly two years ago, we did it in Toronto, and Ben

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Bernanke was our keynote. And I thought, you know, first of all, I thought it was great, back to like, it's good for the crypto community that Ben Bernanke is doing a keynote for a crypto conference, in effect. I mean, obviously Ripple's a little different.

• 55:01Anthony Pompliano?

  You also had Snoop Dogg once, right?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  That was for, he wasn't speaking at a conference, but he was, that's another story. We can talk about that next.

• 55:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm just impressed that you got Ben Bernanke and Snoop Dogg.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  That's only six months apart.

• 55:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Keep going.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  All right. So what Ben Bernanke was saying, which I subscribe to, is that if you're talking about G20 markets, to give up the ability for them to control their money supply is giving up their sovereignty. They're going to bring out the tanks before they give up their sovereignty. His point was basically that, you know, if what you are doing is threatening the sovereignty of a nation, that is a, that is a very high kind of attack on a nation, and they're going to fight that aggressively. And so when I see people doing things in the crypto world that I feel like, and I use G20 specifically, because, look, there are many countries have already lost control of their money supply. You know, we could

• 55:55Speaker 01

  choose Zimbabwe as a example that is amusing to learn about. But there's a whole lot of markets, you know, and I use the G20, that they're not going to just sit idly by and, you know, have their fiat and have their ability to control monetary policy be disrupted.

• 56:13Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. One more question on this, and then we'll move on.

• 56:17Anthony Pompliano?

  If I am Bank of Pomp, and since we won't use Bank of Brad, we will for laughs and jokes, we'll call Bank of Satoshi that I'm going to send money to.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 56:27Anthony Pompliano?

  If I send from-

• 56:28Speaker 01

  I think there would be a Bank of Satoshi by now.

• 56:30Anthony Pompliano?

  There probably is. Somebody somewhere created it. Somebody definitely bought the domain, bankofsatoshi.com. You're welcome for the free advertising. If I send money from Bank of Pomp to Bank of Satoshi, but Bank of Satoshi is located in Iran, let's say, right? So a company that, or a country that is sanctioned by the US, massive ramifications if you tried to do this in the quote-unquote "traditional banking system." One, can I do that through RippleNet? I'm assuming no, but I'll let you clarify. And then, two, along with that, can you, as Ripple or RippleNet, blacklist certain accounts, etc.? Or is that done at a bank level? What is your control over in terms of blacklisting and preventing sending of money?

• 57:14Speaker 01

  In reverse order, we can't blacklist because we don't have PII.

• 57:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  So if I could blacklist Pomp, I would. That's just a general rule. Not Pomp, but there's some others out there that I might. On the first question, we don't work with any banks in Iran. You know, when we think about what qual- so first of all, there's obviously US government requirements about certain countries you can't do business with. Iran would be on that list. When we think beyond that, you know, if a bank is a SWIFT-enabled bank, we generally look at that and say, okay, they're part of the global banking infrastructure, ergo, there's no reason why Ripple shouldn't work with them.

• 57:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think the question is less about the specific country, more so whatever the rules of a legacy bank are presented, right? So if they can't send money to Iran, XRP can't be sent there as well through RippleNet because you're working with these banking partners.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and keep in mind, the Bank of Pomp, at the end of the day, you Bank of Pomp can be connected to RippleNet, and you still are choosing with whom you're settling across the network. So, I mean, if, let's not use Iran, let's use Zimbabwe, because I imagine a lot of people might have concerns about settling with banks in Zimbabwe. You know, I think you may choose, I'm not, even though I'm connected to RippleNet, even though it's super efficient, it's super fast, super low cost, do I want to have as a correspondent, a bank in Zimbabwe? You know, that's up to you.

• 58:37Anthony Pompliano?

  It's up to me. Got it. All right. So I want to play a game that I call Devil's Advocate. But before we play, and the point of this game is essentially to present to you the,

• 58:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I can't say thousands, hundreds of people or tens of people who tweeted at me all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories, detractions, and then even some that seemed pretty valid, right? In terms of what they were saying. Before we do that, though, the number one topic by far that everyone was focused on was XRP sales, right? There was a whole bunch of stuff around that. Before I ask any questions, you just kind of describe, how do the sales work? And kind of as you sit on the Ripple side as CEO, how do you view XRP, escrow, sales, revenue, all this kind of stuff?

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. So I'll start talking about, I'm sure I'm going to miss a couple of things you should ask about there because there are a whole bunch of good questions in there.

• 59:33Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a great interview technique to throw out a bunch of questions.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  And just see where I bite. So, I mean, look, I'm glad you're asking about this. I think there's a bunch of misinformation. You know, before the show, I said to you, like, one of the reasons I'm here is because I think there's a bunch of misinformation. And I think we need to get a little more aggressive about clarifying some of that. The first thing I'll say that people kind of lose sight of, I think, is we are the most interested party in the success and health of the XRP ecosystem.

• 59:58Anthony Pompliano?

  We being Ripple?

• 59:59Speaker 01

  We Ripple. We own, I mean, it's very transparent. We own a lot of XRP. Anything we do that's not good for the XRP ecosystem is not good for, I mean, by the way, there's a whole bunch of other players in the XRP ecosystem. Some of their companies we've invested in, some are doing their own independent thing. Just this week, you know, a bunch of announcements about SDK, this is an announcement this week around SDKs around the XRP ledger that I think are profound and will only see more people building on top of the XRP ledger. That's good for the whole, the whole group. When we think about what we're doing, we've tried one to be very transparent. In the kind of context of leading by example, I think one of the limitations that the crypto ecosystem broadly faces is lack of transparency.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  If we're not going to be transparent, we shouldn't expect people to, you know, trust us. Now, in some ways, I admit, in a frustrating way, our transparency has opened us up to attack.

• 1:00:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so hold on, pause for a second.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Pause.

• 1:00:54Anthony Pompliano?

  The one thing that I will say is I do believe that your life would be easier if you didn't provide any information, because people would-

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Sadly, I agree.

• 1:01:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Because people would, what I honestly believe, and this is across every single company, public companies specifically, right? Public companies would have less scrutiny in many cases if they were private, right? Same thing kind of applies here is the more information you put out, whether you're right or wrong, whether you're fully transparent or semi-transparent, people then now have data points.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, and they can use that to all that stuff, right?

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  There's an example of this I'll point to. Joe Lubin and I were on a panel in Davos earlier this year.

• 1:01:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  And Joe Lubin was criticizing, I can't remember exactly, there's a video of it somewhere out on the internet, but he was criticizing, you know, Ripple and XRP and, you know, and I was like, wait, wait-

• 1:01:44Anthony Pompliano?

  While you were on the panel with them?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And by the way, I actually like-

• 1:01:46Anthony Pompliano?

  That's pretty ballsy.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  He was being direct, you know, I don't, I think it kind of backfired on him, you can go watch the video, you can make your own judgment, but I'm like, okay, wait a minute, before you're going to criticize what Ripple's doing, how much ETH does Joe Lubin own? How much ETH does Consensus own? How much are you selling? What are you using that for? You know, look, I think the best way to lead is by example, and so Ripple has tried to lead by example.

• 1:02:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Talk about the mechanism of escrow, sales, kind of how the whole process works.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So, just structurally, don't worry about numbers for right now.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm going to try to remember the exact time frame. About two years ago, one of the big, you know, kind of overhangs, if you will, concerns about the XRP market had been Ripple owns a lot of it. What happens if Ripple decides to sell a lot of it? I always use the argument, well, that wouldn't be in Ripple's best interest. So why would we do that?

• 1:02:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And the concern there is basically if you dump it all on the market all at once, it would depress the price.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  That's, that's one of the concerns. I think there's some others, but yes. And I, of course, would always, you know, I always thought it was a little bit of just a silly argument because that would not be in our best interest. So why would we ever do that? We, we took that off the table as a concern by saying, look, I'll tell you what. We are going to lock up and so the XRP ledger has a capability called an escrow. It can be cryptographically signed, sealed, if you will. And we created 55 contracts, 55 escrows that effectively become unlocked once a month for 55 months. There was 1 billion XRP in each escrow. So in month one.

• 1:03:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So 55 billion XRP locked up in, in an escrow.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Well, in 55 escrows.

• 1:03:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. And then each one kind of on a one by month basis, each one kind of fires off and releases 1 billion XRP.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:03:26Anthony Pompliano?

  When it releases, where does it go?

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  We can do whatever we want with it.

• 1:03:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. We being Ripple.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  We Ripple. I mean, these escrow, you know, Ripple owns the XRP.

• 1:03:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  We on our own accord.

• 1:03:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And you guys own the escrow. So, uh, cause one of the things that I don't think I understood well, and people are asking questions. So I apologize to anyone who thinks I get this wrong is, they were like, it's not real escrow because Ripple still owns it. What you're basically saying is it's cryptographically signed.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  We can't unlock it.

• 1:03:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Yeah. So it's, I guess somebody could make the argument, you quote, quote, own it, but there's cryptographic signage on it and you don't, you can't violate it.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Correct. Right. That's correct.

• 1:04:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So. So you get the billion, you get the billion XRP once a month for 55 months.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  We use some of it for, uh, deals. Well, back to you asked, we sell some programmatically. I want to talk, I'll digress on that for, you asked about it earlier. I didn't touch on it. We sell XRP two different ways.

• 1:04:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  One is OTC, over the counter.

• 1:04:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Institutions come to us. They want exposure to XRP rather than going into the market. Sometimes they'll come to us and we'll facilitate, facilitate a transaction.

• 1:04:30Anthony Pompliano?

  What, okay. Let's go real slow here because this is where all the questions were. What are the types of institutions that come for OTC? Are these like hedge, crypto hedge funds or are these like bank customer types?

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  More the former than the latter.

• 1:04:44Anthony Pompliano?

  More than, okay, so this is more-

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  This is more crypto speculators.

• 1:04:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Are coming to you and saying, hey, we'd like to buy over the counter.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:04:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Now, two things about the over the counter piece. One is, you know, so over the history of the time I've been in the company, I don't know, order magnitude would have 20 to 30 unique players come to us to buy XRP.

• 1:05:04Anthony Pompliano?

  No, that's really not that many. I thought it was gonna be way higher than that.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:05:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. We basically have stopped all OTC in large part because our attitude is, look, there's enough liquidity out in the market. You can go into the market and get it.

• 1:05:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Market being you can go on an exchange or you can go to other OTC providers.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  There's a lot of very successful OTC desks and we refer people to those OTC desks or you could go ahead and, you know, buy it on exchange. It depends on the size, but. So, you know, we, back to our transparency, we put out what's called the XRP market report.

• 1:05:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Once a quarter, at the end of each quarter, we will publish exactly, you know, hey, this is how much XRP came out. This is how much XRP went in. This is how much we sold. We sold some programmatically, we some sold OTC.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  You know, last quarter was a high watermark in terms of the dollar value of XRP sold.

• 1:05:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  And one of the things that we actually agree with is we tried to have a constructive way to engage the market by saying, we're gonna sell OTC and we're gonna sell programmatically at 10 basis points of daily market activity.

• 1:06:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so, and that's a combined OTC and programmatic or 10 basis points each?

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  10 basis points. Well, the OTC tends to be a little bit, you know-

• 1:06:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Lumpy?

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Lumpy, yes. Thank you. That's helpful. The 10 basis points is much easier. The challenge of the 10 basis points became that we were using coin market cap as the measurement stick. Oops.

• 1:06:27Anthony Pompliano?

  You know- What do you use now?

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  We are crypto compare top tier, CCTT.

• 1:06:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  And we think that's a much more trusted, they have an interesting construct around, I'm gonna get this slightly wrong, what kind of tier A, tier B, or tier one?

• 1:06:41Anthony Pompliano?

  You think it's higher quality?

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  It's a higher quali- I think it's a more trustworthy measure of actual volume in XRP liquidity.

• 1:06:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so let me ask one question real quick. This is more personal curiosity. 10 basis points of daily market volume, or of market volume, is that daily, monthly? Okay, so basically, every day, would it be fair to say you guys are 10 basis points of the volume, give or take, depending on dilution, etc.?

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. I'm not sure I understand.

• 1:07:11Anthony Pompliano?

  99.9%. Let's just say that there's a hundred million dollars worth of daily volume before you guys do anything, right?

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  That means that we would be a hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:07:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. You'd be 10 basis points.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:07:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Every day.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  99.9% of all XRP trading, we have nothing to do with.

• 1:07:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Okay. We have, based upon what we saw with coin market cap, we have continued to kind of constrain what we're doing, in part because I think people very appropriately are pointing out like, hey, coin market cap isn't the right measure. You know, is coin market cap going to back to the transparency? And like, I would challenge them to challenge themselves. Like, it's bad for the whole market that that's not a more trusted source.

• 1:07:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So, okay, so programmatically, let's say the last couple of quarters, how much do you think you've sold? And again, one caveat to this whole conversation, right? I think a lot of people want me to like, hold your feet to the fire and say like, oh, you said 100 million dollars, but it was 102.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, here's the good news.

• 1:08:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Just ballpark.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  There is a public number out there that we have published for every quarter for the last eight to 10 quarters.

• 1:08:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Give us the ballpark in terms of the programmatic.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  I think Q1, well, no, I don't know if I can parse programmatic from OTC top of mind. I think Q1 both combined is about 170 million USD.

• 1:08:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  And Q2 is about 250 million USD.

• 1:08:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Q3 is going to be dramatically lower.

• 1:08:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  We will put that XRP markets report out in a couple, I don't know, a week or two.

• 1:08:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Two weeks.

• 1:08:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Couple more questions here. And again, I caveat all this, but this is where all the questions are.

• 1:08:44Anthony Pompliano?

  One, what are you doing with the money? So basically, there's, let's call it Q1, there's 3 billion XRP, right, that get unlocked over a three-month period.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. You take that. In the markets report, by the way, we would have said, and I don't know top of mind, but 3 billion came unlocked, and this is how much went back into the 56th, 57th, 58th contract, or escrows.

• 1:09:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So you will contribute some of it back to the, another escrow.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Not just some of it, but most of it, I mean, I would order max to 80% of it goes back, goes back in.

• 1:09:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. You then sell 170 million Q1, 250 round numbers for Q2. I think one of the, we're getting into the devil's advocate game now, one of them is, what do you guys need all the money for?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, one, we're investing in both the company. We're investing in the, you know, MoneyGram is an interesting deal. We, as I think is very widely known, we committed $50 million to invest in MoneyGram. I think that has been a very successful partnership and investment for them and for us. They're super happy about it, we're happy about it. And again, I think these, the more we're doing to demonstrate scaled use cases of solving real problems, I think that's good for everybody.

• 1:09:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And how much of the unlock, one of the other questions was around, how much of the unlock goes to the company versus what they called company affiliates? And that was founders, foundations, kind of all this other stuff?

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Well, what we're talking about right now is only what the company owns.

• 1:10:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So only Ripple, the billion gets released, then you use some of it for selling revenue, right? That you can then go invest and do all that stuff with, and then some of it just gets contributed back into future escrow.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:10:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. One of the other big ones was misleading market cap, right? And so the big question here was, and I'm literally going to read to you almost verbatim.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  I'm good.

• 1:10:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Just to make sure I don't screw it up. The last thing I want is to ask you tough questions and then have, get me get yelled at by the internet.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Here's the good news, I actually want you to ask tough questions. I honestly think that like, most of the tough questions, I think there's like, like, I'm not an irrational human being.

• 1:11:00Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so hold on, I have, I do have to say this on the record, so everyone can hear it. We've never met before.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  No, we haven't.

• 1:11:06Anthony Pompliano?

  We've never talked before. Somebody asked me the other day what I thought about this. And I said, I, look, I never met the guy before, we got some mutual friends, they speak highly of you. And I said, but I'll tell you what, the guy's got balls to come in here, has no clue what I'm about to ask him. So I'll give him that.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I'm glad you say that, because I think some people are like, oh, well, you know, he has to have pre-approved questions. I think what I said to you before we started is like, look, anything's fair game.

• 1:11:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I will even go further as to say, the folks that know that I was talking to some of the people at Ripple about doing this, that was going to be one of my, what do they call it, like, stopping points? Is if they said, hey, I gotta see the questions first, I wouldn't have done it.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Misleading market cap. Currently stated market cap counts all distributed tokens, including those sent to founders, affiliated foundations and customers. Most of those, though, are held with restricted selling agreements, so they're not actually liquid. If, which can lead to an overstated market cap. If the market cap did not include those, then the implied inflation rate would be much higher. Therefore, it would be a better signal for the downward selling pressure on XRP. Super complicated question.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna caveat it with one- Just try to parse it a little bit.

• 1:12:17Anthony Pompliano?

  One quick sentence. Basically, if you look at the data, the way that some of this is calculated can be, in the detractors' eyes, misleading. Therefore, people can't run correct models to understand the inflation rate.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  Look, I get the question, actually, at a high level. My, my response is largely, how do you calculate? So, we all look at the quote inflation rate of Bitcoin. What about the whales who bought Bitcoin in, you know, in year one? And they're selling some now. Do we count that in the inflation rate? We don't, but isn't that the exact same thing as, you know, a founder of Ripple? Or the founder of the XRP Ledger who's selling some XRP? I'm not disputing the kind of, I think, and I don't know who asked the question, but I'm not disputing that, okay, if we looked holistically about the introduction of supply of XRP, Ripple is one component of it.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  I think about Ripple's participation in the increase of supply equal to the mining increase and the increase of supply of ETH or Bitcoin.

• 1:13:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Because ETH has a whole bunch of, I mean, non-mining related supply that's introduced, right?

• 1:13:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  So does Bitcoin, so does XRP. I, so, and I'm not trying to dodge the question, I'm just saying that like, the question applies to, well, I guess the question's on more a market cap specifically.

• 1:13:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so here's-

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  The market cap is-

• 1:13:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I think there's two components to this. One is, included in the market cap is tokens that are held by restrictive selling agreements?

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I think that's really referring to, one of the co-founders of the XRP Ledger and the co-founders of Ripple is a guy named Jed McCalib. Jed had threatened, well, he didn't just threaten, he said he was going to dump all of his XRP. He was trying, I mean, he had left Ripple and he was trying to start a competitor Ripple called Stellar. And he said he was gonna dump this, there was court activity and a settlement that restricted his ability to sell because he was trying to act in a- You know, not in a good way to the market.

• 1:14:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so I'm kind of jumping around a little bit tangentially related to this. When you guys sell Ripple OTC.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  XRP.

• 1:14:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Or I'm sorry, XRP. Do you guys put restricted selling agreements on anyone who buys OTC?

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Sometimes, yes.

• 1:14:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Sometimes.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  It largely depends. I mean, like if somebody came to us, well, keep in mind, by the way, we, the amount of OTC we're doing now is dramatically less than we were before, for the reasons we've kind of talked about before.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  You know, if somebody was coming to us and saying, I want to buy $20 million of XRP. You know, there is a risk that someone would want to do that and somehow have ill intent. And so we might have restrictions on that. You know, they're also back to the Wales point, you know, and you could argue actually what Ripple has done is healthier than what you have in the ETH environment or Bitcoin, because there are no restrictions. Now, I think in all of these environments, people are probably acting in the best interest.

• 1:15:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Because you're holding, generally.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Right. Unless you're irrational or not very smart.

• 1:15:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Would there be a way for you to, and I'll caveat again, sitting as a person, trying to understand how you guys are thinking about this, and also understanding kind of the other side. There's sensitivities whenever you're doing business transactions with, I'll call them customers, your partners, whoever.

• 1:15:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you don't want to, you know, open source your contracts, right? For example.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:39Anthony Pompliano?

  But is there a way to be more transparent is kind of a negative connotation, but just more transparent around what those selling restrictions are, either on a customer basis or on a more kind of generalized basis?

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  I mean, here's kind of my rats this. Okay, so we're already 10 or 100 times more transparent than anybody in the crypto community, and we get attacked for doing that. And I think you just asked me to be more transparent. I think I'm going to pass.

• 1:16:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not trying to. Yeah, it's just kind of like, like, we are doing what we think are smart strategic things to leverage our balance sheet in a way that we think is rational and thoughtful about catalyzing this whole area.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Am I going to, you know, share our, you know, the cocoa formula of like, here's how we're doing things? I mean, is it that secret and special? Yeah, we can debate that, but like.

• 1:16:34Anthony Pompliano?

  This is actually, so here's what I'll say. This is one thing where if people were, and there actually are some people who want you guys to do this, right? Said, basically, open source the contracts, right? Like, show us exactly what every single contract looks like with every single customer. I actually think that's like, pretty far overkill, right? Just given that you're trying to run a business, etc. So, so I'll definitely.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  It also, if I may, I think one of the challenges for how capitalism has evolved, period, is we're very short-term centric. I have been very public in saying, look, I'm taking a very long view of the company we're trying to create. And, you know, if I piss some people off in the short term, I'm okay with that. I, I, I think, I think, you know, I didn't talk about this earlier, but I was in business school when Jeff Bezos, this is 1996, Jeff Bezos hadn't really launched Amazon. He came to my class in 1996, talked about Amazon, and it was Amazon Books.

• 1:17:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  And he talked about, and I, since then, I've been enamored, a bunch of my classmates ended up working at Amazon, and I've been kind of enamored watching the company. And I think what they have done has been very, very impressive in lots of ways. But one of the things I have looked at, I think about Ripple is to cross-border payments as Amazon is to books.

• 1:17:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, you got to explain that.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Amazon, Amazon launched one vertical, books. Had they not succeeded in books, they never would have been able to do DVDs or music or, you know, now.

• 1:17:55Anthony Pompliano?

  AWS.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Right, AWS, right? That's the infrastructure level. When I think about Ripple's doing, there's a lot of different applications of blockchain technologies. There's a lot of different ways we could use the XRP ledger. We started with a vertical around cross-border payments, partly because it's a massive market, partly because it's a very clear pain point. You have customers who don't like the incumbents, they're happy to engage. But what I've said to the company is, look, we have to be successful in books, AKA cross-border payments, or we don't get permission to go to the second vertical. But ultimately, I see what Ripple's doing with blockchain technologies as, we're going to enter other verticals, for sure.

• 1:18:32Anthony Pompliano?

  What will they be?

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. I mean, I should open source that, too.

• 1:18:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Just throw it out there that that would be another type that you would enter.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  I mean, we have.

• 1:18:45Anthony Pompliano?

  You're a master of dodging. I appreciate it.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  That's that. That's why, look, we're looking at lots of different things.

• 1:18:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Other types of financial services.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  I'll give you another interesting example, but real quickly. Do you know who the largest investor was in pets.com when it went bankrupt?

• 1:18:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I do not.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Amazon.

• 1:18:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  The only reason I point that out is, look, we have made a bunch of investments in other projects going on out there. I think right now Ripple is the largest investor in crypto period. We've invested about $500 million in other crypto projects. We're going to make a bunch of investments in a lot of different things. Some of them unrelated to the XRP world, some very related, some related Ripple, some unrelated, some related payments, some unrelated. Some of those may be things that we end up buying. Some of those maybe end up things that we.

• 1:19:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Investing.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, great. My point to some degree is in the nascent stage of a market and watching Amazon lose money on pets.com. That was totally okay, right? You know, they were learning as they went and we're going to do the same thing. There will certainly be other verticals that we go after at Ripple, and I'm not even sure how I got on this topic.

• 1:19:44Anthony Pompliano?

  That's good. That's the point of why I'm here to interview you is just to lead you with breadcrumbs.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  You asked me a question. Somehow I got on Amazon. I'm not sure.

• 1:19:51Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So as part of this, um, one of the things that also comes up in the sales, I think is the last question on sales is, um,

• 1:20:00Anthony Pompliano?

  how do you think about when you sell OTC, right? So there's the restrictive, uh, selling agreements, then there's some sort of discounting at times, sometimes not. Talk just about.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  Generally not.

• 1:20:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, generally not. Uh, when there is, is it, hey, if you lock this up, there's a discount or kind of how do you think about it from a framework standpoint first?

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  I mean, look, so first of all, generally there is not.

• 1:20:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  To the extent there is, it's, hey, we're doing a bigger, broader deal in some construct and we're thinking a lot of different, you know, how do you create value on both sides and a lot of different pieces?

• 1:20:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And this is likely, uh, would it be fair to say the discounted OTC sales are not with the crypto speculators? They're more with customers and partners?

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:20:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And what would have?

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  For sure. Correct.

• 1:20:45Anthony Pompliano?

  A bigger, a bigger deal. Would be, and this is me just completely speculating, making this up, but I think generally if I'm sitting in your seat, it's something like, hey, you're going to be a customer of our software product. We're going to also give you some XRP for liquidity purposes or whatever. You can basically buy it at some discount and then you can hold on your balance sheet.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Or we'll loan it to you and, you know, at a very low interest rate or, you know, I mean,

• 1:21:09Anthony Pompliano?

  There's different mechanisms.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Right. Okay. We're trying to be thoughtful and creative about how we catalyze the whole marketplace. And, you know, like there are, the good news for us is there's other companies in the XRP world who are doing similar things. They're just not as big as we are. They don't own as much XRP, but there's a lot of other cool stuff going on and I guess that's good for everybody.

• 1:21:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And by the way, I don't think that doing that is wrong, right? I mean, look, every, there's people who I sell things and I discount them. So like I understand. Um, what do you think the average discount is?

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. I mean,

• 1:21:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Like 50%?

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, I would say five. I mean, like, I don't know.

• 1:21:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Smaller numbers.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Right. I mean, look, I, I think about XRP as a currency. I should, I mean, would you sell a dollar for 50 cents?

• 1:21:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Is, well, that was gonna be one of my questions is, do you think it's a currency? Do you look at it more of like a utility token? How do you think about it?

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  I mean, I, you know, part of the question, I was like, I don't know what exactly is a utility token. What is it? I mean, there's some parsing.

• 1:22:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Now you're starting to sound like me.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  I don't even know. Look, what I do know, maybe for better or for worse, in 2015, we had a FinCEN settlement with the government.

• 1:22:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  The US government called XRP a currency.

• 1:22:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  I think of it as a currency for purposes of deals, like what you're describing. I think of it as a currency. And so, and if I were thinking about a, a deal construct and back to the whole reason we're talking about this is that the discount point, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't give dollars away for 50, for half dollars, right? Would I give someone a advantageous deal denominated in dollars for some reason? Sure.

• 1:22:46Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes sense. Okay, so let's go to XRP Army in terms of all of the engagement on Twitter.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:22:56Anthony Pompliano?

  You're not the XRP Army commander. What do you, what has your reaction been to this? What is kind of your perspective on kind of how enthusiastic people are online?

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  Look, I love the fact that there's a group of people who believe in what we're doing, are advocating, and if anything, I actually think the XRP Army is a reaction to the aggressiveness of the FUD.

• 1:23:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting. Elaborate on this.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Well, I think people are, there are sometimes more than other times, people are putting out information that is factually incorrect, either about Ripple, or about the XRP Ledger, or about the people around the ecosystem, or about other companies in the ecosystem. And, you know, that, that community has been catalyzed to correct that. And in that context, I think that's awesome. You know, are they a more vibrant group than others? I don't know. Look, I get attacked by plenty who are outside of that army. Those are pretty active people, too.

• 1:23:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I think the whole space is super engaged, right? And then there's-

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  And in some ways, that's a beautiful, healthy thing. But look, can we all start with the same basis of facts? And, you know, I think some people just stop listening in a way that I find to be, you know, frustrating. And I'm still learning. We shall still learn. There's things that I don't fully understand about what's going on in the Bitcoin world. There's things I learned in this conference in Montreal I found super interesting.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  But there's a lot of misunderstandings about what Ripple is, about what the XRP Ledger is, how it works, and, you know, I look, as I said, I'm here today to try to correct the record on some of those things.

• 1:24:30Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. I've only got a couple more questions that we've got to wrap up.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  Sounds good.

• 1:24:34Anthony Pompliano?

  In terms of payment to employees, one of the things I find fascinating is there's plenty of companies that are built around Bitcoin, employees accept Bitcoin as their salary, Binance, BNB.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Are there folks at Ripple slash XRP that are working on this and getting paid in XRP?

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Well, you said Ripple slash XRP. There's employees at Ripple who choose to get paid in XRP. Yes.

• 1:24:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  I don't think anybody gets paid 100% in XRP, but it's a, you know, it's kind of an opt-in. And we may limit the amount, the percentage they can take in XRP. I'm not sure.

• 1:25:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. All right. So last topic I want to cover, I call this like the elephant in the room. And it's more from my standpoint, one of the things that we did not do as investors is we did not participate in the whole ICO stuff. Right. And for us, it was more around, I'll call it regulatory uncertainty. Right. And for us, it was, we had so many opportunities on the equity side where we could go invest that it was just like, eh, we don't really have an advantage there. So we'll leave it for other people. What's your perspective on tokens, regulation? There's been a bunch of settlements recently that have been announced, kind of at the end of the fiscal year for the SEC, et cetera, with EOS and Block 1 and all that, kind of just broad based first, just like, how do you view this whole environment?

• 1:25:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Given that you've actually been working on this for, you know, what, four or five years now? You've kind of seen some evolutions there. What's your perspective?

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Like, I think if you go back and look at my Twitter feed, you will find that I was one of the first people to come out and say, I think this whole ICO thing's going to end badly.

• 1:26:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  I think if you go back and look, I was, I was very early in saying, danger, danger.

• 1:26:11Anthony Pompliano?

  You said that. Kudos to you.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  I was on a panel, and I remember this well, it was an MIT panel, and I tell you, there was like 800 people showed up to this thing in San Francisco. It was a massive audience. And it was right at the height of the ICO market. I remember there was a lawyer sitting next to me who was kind of advocating, yeah, I do an ICO. And I, all I said was, if you're going to do an ICO, just remember to hold back a lot of that money to pay him as a lawyer to defend you when the SEC comes after you. Now, one of the other things I'll just point out is an interesting irony about this whole thing is we at Ripple, and even I think the XRP community kind of leaned out during that craze, and ETH community leaned in to really enable the, that, the ICO craze.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Isn't it ironic that by doing that ETH was then deemed not to be a security given its distribution and the SEC hasn't said anything about XRP? We decided that, hey, look, we think that actually clearly Ripple didn't do an ICO. The XRP ledger predated Ripple.

• 1:27:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Was there a quote unquote ICO for XRP on the XRP ledger?

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  No, the early days of XRP ledger were giveaways. Ripple, the company, raised money through venture capital and did a series of financing, a series A financing, a series B financing.

• 1:27:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  What have you?

• 1:27:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I gotta ask, XRP, there's plenty of people who think it's security, plenty of people who don't.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  I think there's plenty of people who don't.

• 1:27:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  I mean, look, there's a, I don't know exactly the name of it, this ranking system that came out this week.

• 1:27:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw the crypto rating.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you read my notes before this? So one of my questions is literally going to be, if you look at those rankings compared to others, you guys actually scored pretty well, right? And then I think that the big question, and I'm very sensitive to the fact that I don't want you to say anything that you're uncomfortable saying, but at the same time, how do you think about, if you're sitting in the regulator's seat, deciding what's a security, what's not? This stuff's new. You spoke about ETH transitioning possibly from could have been a security to now it's not. Just talk a little bit about that, you know, sitting, running, what do you guys have, the third or fourth largest cap asset now?

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  Depends where you count market cap, right? Like, I think the SEC has a really hard job and I genuinely mean that. Like, this is a new thing, you know, what does it mean? How should it be regulated? And so I'm respectful of the fact that it's, some of the stuff, it's not black and white. I think that, you know, how that plays out is, I think, yet to be determined. I think the, slowly but surely, the SEC is providing more guidance, both through how, what they're doing with an enforcement mechanism and what they're doing, you know, kind of what they're publishing on policy stuff. You know, we work with regulators around the world, you know, some regulators have been much kind of quicker than the US has about being specific. You know, the UK has come out and said that they view XRP in the same thing as ETH and BTC.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  We've seen a bunch of other, you know, Japan, that has been true. So, you know, I can't certainly speak on behalf of the SEC. Suffice to say, I think they've got a hard job and I understand that, you know, they're kind of trying to do their best to work through it.

• 1:29:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Before we wrap up, I always ask two questions. Oh, you get to ask me one question to end it, but my two questions, most important book you've ever read? We just went from debating the intricacies of securities law to now favorite book.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  Snow Crash.

• 1:29:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Snow Crash. Oh.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  Old school.

• 1:29:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's three books that are given to product managers when they join Facebook and Snow Crash is one of them.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Really? I didn't know that.

• 1:29:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I actually forget the other two.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  I was given Snow Crash in somewhere around 95, 96, and I thought it was pretty fascinating.

• 1:29:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, for those that read it, I think a lot of people receive it and never read it, but those who read it is pretty good. Aliens, believer or non-believer?

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:29:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  There's too many things out there. It's a law of large numbers.

• 1:29:54Anthony Pompliano?

  If they showed up to the US, would that be a good, or I'm sorry, to the Earth, would that be a good or bad thing?

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Oh, we have aliens here already, for sure. Have you been outside New York City? Jesus. Okay, I'm kidding about that.

• 1:30:06Anthony Pompliano?

  So Brad actually went to Area 51.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  All right, my one question for you is, do you think differently about Ripple and the XRP Ledger now? As compared to 60, 70, 80 minutes, I don't know how much longer we've been here.

• 1:30:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So I will, I'm gonna expertly dodge that only because

• 1:30:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I think most people actually don't know what I thought before you walked in here.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  Oh, that's fair. Well, I just asked you if you thought differently.

• 1:30:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah. So I think I'm actually on the podcast on record saying that it's important to separate out software company from XRP.

• 1:30:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually think that having software that makes banks run better, there's big businesses to be built there, right? We've actually invested in a bunch of businesses that are either trying to disrupt software products that are currently in banks or are helping banks be more efficient. That all makes a lot of sense to me. XRP, my only big thing that I just can't get over, right, and I understand the academic or I understand the argument as to why is if you can use XRP, right, across the rails, why not use Bitcoin? Now, I think your argument would be volatility, the fact that you can't stop it, all the things.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  It's a lot faster and a lot cheaper to use XRP.

• 1:31:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So what I end up coming to is there are two, there's probably many versions of the future, but two of those versions are what I will call a corporate company creating a software product that is then sold in an enterprise model into banks, which you guys are doing, and there is likely to be something other than Bitcoin that's used. So whether that's XRP or somebody else comes along and creates something, or it's Libra, or you know, whatever, whatever gets created.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Wait, the White Paper?

• 1:31:49Anthony Pompliano?

  We, you notice I didn't even go there until the end. I messed up. We're not going there. All right. And then the other world is a world of Bitcoin, which, yeah, there will be people who build this stuff, but it's much more kind of empowering people. It's fighting back against things like inflation, the banking system, yada, yada, yada.

• 1:32:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I really do think that what ends up being the most valuable is which path the world goes down. Right?

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 1:32:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, I don't think that it is a, if we go down the path where we need something that is fully decentralized, non-sensible, non-seizable, et cetera, like, I don't think that Ripple and XRP end up being the winner, right, in that world. Vice versa, if we go down a world where we need a corporate software company that sells into banks, et cetera, like, I actually don't think that Bitcoin can win in that world.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  There's an expression that I use sometimes at work, much to the frustration of Ripple employees. It's the tyranny, the tyranny of the or versus the power of the and. Why is it one or the other of those? Oh, there's kind of, and I know we're wrapping up, but, you know, I think one of the mistakes that people make in this kind of broader crypto world is that there's not going to be one winner here. There's going to be a bunch of interesting winners. And by the way, I, you know, I would even yield the point, is the XRP environment clearly going to be a winner? You know, I think there's some interesting dynamics there that make it more efficient in a whole bunch of ways. But I think at the end of the day, it comes back to like, is it, are these technologies being used to solve a real problem for real customers in a scaled way? And there's a lot of, a long way to go in all of them.

• 1:33:21Anthony Pompliano?

  One sentence answer, at the end of this, whenever you go do whatever you go do next, it could be 30 years from now, what is the legacy that you want Ripple, XRP, and Bitcoin to leave on the world?

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  I hope that these technologies put a little dent in the universe in terms of making commerce more efficient.

• 1:33:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's completely fair. All right, listen, you get a lot of credit for coming and doing this completely blind, so I appreciate it very much. And where can people find you on the internet?

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  At B Garland House, Twitter, at B Garland House.

• 1:33:58Anthony Pompliano?

  The XRP Army, the lovers, the detractors have at it. All right, guys, thanks so much.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Thanks, Paul.

• 1:34:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.