Ripple holds over $1 billion in cash reserves, and its XRP token reserves may have exceeded $100 billion.
Written by: Austin King, Co-founder of Omni Network
Compiled by: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
I sold my first company to Ripple, whose chairman is my mentor and also an investor in Omni Network.
Here is an insider interpretation of Ripple, including its origins and my views on its future development.
First and foremost, the most important thing to understand is not the company's business, but the founder (and current chairman) himself: Chris Larsen. Companies often reflect the characteristics of their founders, so what kind of person is he?
As early as the 1990s, he began working in fintech companies. In 1999, he took E-Loan public, a company that once had hundreds of employees and a market value exceeding $1 billion. After that, he founded another fintech company, Prosper, which raised over $70 million.
After nearly two decades of entrepreneurial experience, he began creating Ripple—these early experiences in fintech profoundly influenced Ripple's and the XRP token's early market strategies.
So what was Ripple's initial strategy?
In simple terms, they play the role of 'the most mature adult in the room.' Even today, the cryptocurrency industry is still highly questioned in the eyes of outsiders—imagine how much more skepticism there was when they created XRP in 2013. To this end, they intentionally sought to decouple from the prevailing anarchist/libertarian culture at the time, instead proposing a new narrative: their blockchain is not meant to replace the financial system, but to improve the existing system.
To further reinforce this point, their market strategy has always been to promote the adoption of XRP by fintech companies and banks.
What is Ripple actually doing
Interestingly, their current market strategy is very similar in many ways to the projects within the Ethereum ecosystem, except that the audience they target is completely different.
For example, a recent public announcement was that Optimism provided Kraken with a grant of 25 million OP tokens (worth over $60 million today) to encourage Kraken to use the OP Stack. In a way, it can be said that Ripple had already written a similar script long ago— for instance, in 2019, they struck a deal with the large cross-border payment company MoneyGram: Ripple provided $50 million in funding in exchange for equity, on the condition that MoneyGram must integrate Ripple's products, which use XRP for cross-border settlements.
Everything Ripple builds ultimately aims to promote the adoption of XRP.
Where is Ripple headed in the future
They have massive funds. Earlier this year, they spent $285 million to buy back equity; even so, they still hold over $1 billion in cash reserves, not to mention their XRP reserves (which I believe have exceeded $100 billion as of now).
There is no doubt that they will leverage their brand and capital reserves to further promote the adoption of XRP in the existing financial system.
Another important factor that I believe many people overlook is that Ripple is the only large U.S. company that issues tokens. Coupled with Trump's proposal to eliminate capital gains tax on domestic cryptocurrencies, this is a major boost for Ripple.
In the past three years, Ripple has faced severe headwinds due to being rooted in the United States, such as the SEC's lawsuit which may have caused them to miss the last bull market. But looking ahead to the next four years, they could actually be one of the most promising companies thriving in the U.S. that supports cryptocurrency.
