Ripple Swell Day Two Roundup: Regulation, Blockchain Adoption, and XRP

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The second and the final day of Ripple’s Swell conference maintained the excitement of the previous day.

The San Francisco event, which on the first day saw former US President Bill Clinton taking the stage to speak about crypto revolution, and the launch of Ripple’s much-awaited xRipple cross-border payment service, shifted its focus to blockchain adoption and adoption stories of RippleNet. A thorough discussion on global regulation that took place on the event’s first day also found mentions during the addresses on the second day.

Recap: Global Regulatory Policy Discussion

Experts joining from Ripple, Banco Central do Brasil, Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, Payment Canada and many other financial giants had valuable opinions to add to the ongoing discussions about regulating blockchain assets. Sunil Sabharwal, former IMF executive and now the head of a DC-based financial consulting firm, believed high compliance costs in various countries caused blockchain exodus. Highlighted were the qualities of public ledger in solving many existential issues of payment and banking industry:

“In cross-border payments, business-to-business payments are about 150 trillion dollars. Remittances — that’s about $240 billion in revenue. Remittances, mostly person-to-person payments by migrants, is about $500-600 billion a year.”

Sabharwal identified roadblocks that could be hampering the pace of blockchain innovation, ranging from the lack of global cooperation among central banks to a lack of training. A comprehensive regulatory framework for a technology that is organically borderless has been sought, with the belief that it would bring all the central banks in line with the acceptable blockchain practices.

Marcelo Yared, the CIO of Banco Central do Brasil, agreed with Sabharwal on the potential of blockchain in cutting operational costs.

“Blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) is a kind of tool for us to solve things,” said Yared. “We’ve seen good things with blockchain and DLT in knowing our customers and in exchanging information inside the Brazilian financial system, and we see good things in cross-border payments.”

Mohsen Alzaharani, the Director of Innovation at Saudi Arabia Monetary Authority (SAMA), also confirmed that they tested a private digital currency to conduct a cross-border transaction on a blockchain.

“We saw it could bring more efficiency to cross-border payments,” he said. “Using a settlement coin, a kind of currency that can settle between two different fiat currencies is our idea of exploring the technology.”

Blockchain Adoption is Closer than Ever

Ripple released a privately-researched blockchain report during the keynote of the second day of Swell conference. The report claimed that blockchain adoption is near, citing payment and bank organizations worldwide that are already incorporating digital assets into payment flows.

Cory Johnson, Chief Market Strategist at Ripple, dived into the report to explain the usual market size of global remittance, explaining bullish figures and opportunities they bring for many payment startups and companies worldwide. However, as it appeared, it was the blockchain’s mainstream adoption that interested the Swell attendees.

Alenka Grealish, co-presenter and senior analyst for corporate banking at Celent, remarked that blockchain is already at a tipping point of mass adoption. Already more than 700 banks and 22 countries are testing blockchain for payments.

“When you envision the scale with the status quo on one side and the forces of change on the other, we see that the status quo weighs heavy, but the forces of change are starting to dominate — to tip the scale in the direction of change.”

XRP Drops, Meanwhile

It was believed that the xRapid system launch, coupled with the timing of Swell event, could bring some bullish bias to the XRP market. But, on the contrary, the duo was not able to lift the Ripple’s September gains further. Since the weekend XRP has been inside a bear trajectory and has fallen by more than 5 percent in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.com. XRP is now testing its previous week’s low at $0.52 as the next support level.