The total amount of US dollar right now. It just US dollar loan in
the world. If you look at M zero, M one, M two
money supply, that's like twenty one to twenty two trillion dollars. So why
am I saying this? I'm saying this because like we're not so much thinking
about oh my god, how is this going to compete with, you know,
USDC and USDT, but more about like, hey, this pie is
going to grow so much better, bigger right than it is right now.
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description. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward.
With me today is Marcus Infinger, who is the SVP at Ripple X
Marcus. Great to have you on. Hey, Tony, thanks so much
for having me on. And yeah, hi, hi to everybody out there.
Yeah, Marcus, I'm excited to speak with you. Obviously, Ripple
has the launch of a stable coin on its horizons, and I have a
lot of questions for you on that, but I would love to get to
know you a bit better. Tell us about your background and where you're from.
Yes, so I'm from the middle of Heidilands. I was born and
raising, Switzerland, six hundred meters above sea level, six hundred people village,
more cows than humans. And yeah, beautiful panoramic views on the mountains.
Only now I realize you know how marvelous actually that spot is. Yeah,
that's awesome. And as far as your professional background, I notice you
spent time at Credit Sueeze. Tell us a bit about that. Oh man,
you're throwing me onder the bus like a few minutes in. You start
with Credit Suite. Actually, my career started with UBS and by the way,
for the record, UBS is still alive and obviously, as you know
many of you out there, no UBIS has aquired Credit Sueeze. But yeah,
I you know, I spent most of my career actually our credits is
absolutely right. I was in for an exchange, working from the trading force,
advising customers on for an exchange, training strategies, leading teams, and
then at some point came to London. Now, what was your first encounter
with bitcoin or cryptocurrencies and what was your ahamo? My first encounter was me
being very ignorant about it, and that taught me like a pretty yeah,
a pretty serious less It was back in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen. I
was at Credit Suez and it was one of the you know it guys nerds
talking to me about bitcoin and started like kind of debate. You know,
I'm in foreign exchange. How we're dealing like with billions of dollars every day?
You want to teach me about money, you want to debate you get
amount money. At some point I ran out of the arguments and I was
just like, you know, it left me wondering, but it, you
know, unfortunately didn't left me curious enough to really dive into the rabbit hole
there. It's definitely something I'll remember for the rest of my life. Always
listen, you know, to nerds and then, you know, back in
twenty seventeen, that's when I really got into the rabbit hole. I've been
in there ever since. Now. You have a lot of experience in trad
five. I love you. If you can tell us a bit about the
contrast I work in TraFi and now in the crypto blockchain industry, and maybe
this this question kind of answers itself, but what are the things you see
that crypto solves that some of the problems you encountered in the past. Yeah,
So if I reflect on sort of like my last five years in the
financial industry, and by the way, I you know, I love that
background. You know, lots of smart people. I still have many friends.
If I reflect on the last five years, I increasingly, you know,
kind of like felt a little bit of a lack of like purpose in
terms of like, hey, why are we doing what we're doing here?
And then separately as well, I felt like, hey, we're kind of
like preserving what we have and we're not really you know, trying hard to
create new things. And you know, I was working in a large financial
institution. It's hard to steer big tanker ships in a different direction obviously,
but so yeah, I kind of like reflect a little bit like this,
and you know, to some degree the purpose has become about money and making
money. And when I started to engage with Ripple, which I was basically
put in touch with it through a recruiting agency, I was just like really
amazed about the conversations in terms of like looking at you know, hey,
how can we make money and finance better in the first place, and creating
something working with a powerful technology to transform financial markets. And that got me.
Yeah, obviously intrigue them kept me here for for five years now.
In terms of you know, the problems, I would say, you know,
the financial system works at least as far as I have experienced it in
the West, being born and grown up in Switzerland, and you know,
now and now in London, I feel at large it works. However,
I feel as well too at the court it's stuck in the pre Internet era,
full of friction. If you look at you know, kind of like
just some examples as its takes the beaks to get issued days to get settled
because an arm and a leg. I'm just giving an example. Obviously,
we're pretty strongly involved in the remittance business using blockchain technology. They're still like
six percent on average or transaction, and we're doing it for a fraction of
that in the fraction of a time, right, So I think that's kind
of like still where there's just a ton of opportunity and if you think about
it, you know, there's really a lot of power around like financial markets
in terms of the role they play in our society and seeking for ways to
make everything more efficient contribute to more productive economy will then feed you know,
just like better quality of light and I'm more and more prosperous society for everyone.
And that's kind of like why I'm here, what gets me going every
day, honestly, And so I think blockchain can play a major role in
terms of just like you know, introducing that next paradigm shift for financial markets,
adding more efficiency, similar to what previous innovations have done, like you
know, the introduction of money versus partnering you know, obviously a long long
time ago and things like this. Yeah, and what are your thoughts on
some of the biggest names in the financial industry and banking industry getting involved.
I mean, just yesterday we got news at Goldman Sachs they're going to launch
tokenization projects. We've got black Rock tokenizing. Just it seems folks for waking
up that this is the future. We need to get on board. So
look, we've we've always we as Ripple, have always had the belief that
this transformation is going to come through collaboration with the system as opposed to disruption
of the system, like the financial like the global economy is too much of
a big deal to just say like, hey, we're coming to this drop
and hoping for the system to implode and then everybody to move on to a
blockchain powered like you know, peer pre peered DeFi economy. You know,
like I noticed people out there who who who are who feel there's a lot
that's wrong about the current system. I joined Ripple because Ripple is always believed
in like collaborating with the system and traditional financial institutions, you know, to
inform this together, and it's a collaborative effort. So I very much welcome
what we're seeing. And what I'm particularly excited about is, you know,
we've seen this year clear shift from traditional financial institutions moving beyond the point of
offering crypto as an investment class to their customers. But now they really want
to make the move into solving actual frictions by entering to the game of tokenization,
you know, to give an example, biddle By by Blackrock has many
ways for me, been a bigger deal than a spot Bitcoin ETF and I'm
you know, both have been a big deal. But for me, this
is opening the floodgates for traditional financial institutions to now utilize blockchains to solve financial
frictions, to make assets more efficient, and the most exciting about it from
my perspective, it's happening on public blockchains and direction of travel. I feel
it's towards public blockchains like the xop letter that we obviously work with that revolt.
Now, let's talk a bit a bit more about organization, because I
would love to get your POV on that. My thoughts are, you know,
this is going to make global markets truly global, versus it being siloed
or just certain jurisdictions in countries participating. It's going to open up tertiary markets,
excuse me, secondary and tertiary markets. You might have twenty four to
seven trading, no more opening or closing bell on the wall street. Is
that kind of what we're headed to? Yeah, one hundred percent. Look
if you again just quickly rewind, like, so, what are the pain
points of the existing financial system. It's fragmented, it's full of red tape
at the core. It predates the Internet age. You know, ASTs take
a long time to get issued and several and blockchains have a couple of future
advantages, right they are global, out of the gay and they can be
super super efficient. The except letter, which is the blockchain that we primarily
work with, and it's one of the oldest lay one leading blockchains, as
you know, hopefully know is you know, has been sending transactions in three
to five seconds throughout the last twelve years for a fraction of ascent billions of
transactions. There's something magical about that, right, And so if you can
obviously make sure that this technology can be applied in a way that it's compatible
with the existing financial you know, regulatory frameworks, user safety, you can
just see how powerful the efficiency gains can be for traditional financial institutions as well.
And obviously it's going to require a combination of the two things right to
kind of like get to a place where it can actually be applical today in
the real world as opposed to like in a parallel economy or in some you
know, utopian future. So to say, are there any Ripple x partners
or folks that you're working on with with some cool tokenization projects that you can
highlight. Yeah, So it's it's a definitely, very much a focus area
for us. We've made a few announcements recently. One of them was Zonics
formerly hon As Tacts, which is like you know, tokenization as a service
platform. It's integrated with the XPL, collaborating with us to bring real old
assets on the XPL. There's another project called mel Goold integrating with the XPL
to offer staple coints back by Gold and Silver. And the one that we
most recently announced are sort of like xop letter Ecosystem Flagship event APEX is a
collaboration with Arjas, which is the first uk FCA regulate the Digital Asset Exchange
custodium broker and so in this collaboration, we'll look to bring hundreds of millions
of dollars with real world assets on the xp elect you like token is money
market funds, and they have some pretty significant partnerships already in place with for
example, Aberdeen, which is one of the largest asset manager in the UK,
they have a distribution agreement with black Rock and so you can you can
see how, you know, by collaboration off the crypto sort of like native
industry. With TRAP five, there's now yeah, hundreds, say, if
not billions of dollars of financial assets coming on chain, and yeah, it
super excited to see that. Hard question for you, Mark, is what's
your timeline? You know, as far as all of these banks, all
these financial institutions running with some form of tokenization, stop sponds, commodities,
all these things tokenize, is it a ten year window? You know if
we parallel it with the adoption of the internet, right, but we are
on a faster infrastructure now versus dial up in the nineties, you know,
are you looking at eight to ten years? So it depends on kind of
like what sort of level we're talking about, right, if we're talking about,
hey, trillions of dollars of real world financial assets being on chain and
they're being used, you know, in useful economic activity on a daily basis.
In the trillions I think that's that's ten years out. What I'm personally
very encouraged to see is in the conversation we're having with traditional financial institutions,
and that's a big difference between now and previous years, is that now traditional
financial institutions stay no longer interested in talking about proof of concepts. They're interested
in talking about production use cases, and they come with actually use cases tied
up. Like you know, I give you one example, the other engagement
the NASA manager and they want to tokenize money market funds and then those who
used by another bank as a form of collateral, the more efficient for an
exchange and repail business in terms of you know, the credit efficiencies, credit
risk management efficiencies that can bring, et cetera. And so that's just really
awesome to see. The other side of it is that you know, you
can see how these highly regulated assets are entering into DeFi communities and are being
used by defile users, right, And that's obviously a major distribution force that
I think as well, you know, with more elegant sort of like compliance
features coming on chain, we're by the way building some of these as well,
like the centralized identity. We're doing research and seral knowledge proof and things
like this so that you can see how secondary market activation can happen into DeFi
communities. And then really you know, get to harness the beneficiencies of like
broader access, you know, lower barriers to entry and you know, rehab
patheticating things using these sort of assets as collateral. And so pretty pretty excited
about both of these sort of paths to adoption right within the Trap five.
But then also kind of like fueling and empowering more active DeFi economy. Yeah,
absolutely, and a big part of that is, of course stable coins.
And obviously I want to segue this is a good segue into Ripple's upcoming
stable coin r l U s D. Let's start off with what's the goal
for Ripple in launching the stable coin. Yes, so there's a couple of
things here. The metal point is we believe stable coins play a very important
role in terms of bridging the gap between trat FI and crypto and sort of
like you know, really fueling and kickstarting you know, this transformation towards a
more efficient financial system. And it's as such, you know, a natural
step for Ripple to to to move into based on the track record we have
working with trat FI around payments. You know, we're facilitating billions of dollars
of real world payments with financial institutions obviously today, and so the goal is
really to you know, to on the one hand, use that stable coin
for our payments to do more alongside as it's like XRP. And on the
other hand as well, you know, it's been one of the key feedback
from the developer community and the xp ledger ecosystem that you know, they're looking
for compliance first, highly trusted, high grade stable coins you know, in
in in there to help act as a settlement asset against these real world financial
assets that were now seeing you know, coming into this ecosystem, you know,
better assets for liquidity and the decentralized exchange that's native in the xp ledger,
including the automated market maker we worked with the community on which was released
earlier this year. And so the goal is really to kind of like see
this institutional grade DeFi economy adoption and useful economic activity on the XP ledger,
and on the other hand, obviously ripple using that in the institutional use case
around and you know, cross for the payments and you just do yeah,
way more volumes in the future and offer redundancy to customers. Yeah, that
absolutely makes sense. And like you said, it just fits into Ripple's pedigree
of payments in the vision that you know the company has had for so long
to confirm this, this stable coin will be available to both institutions and retail
It will be in the open market where anybody can pretty much leverage it.
Yes, so it will be the ideas. It's going to be launched later
this year. It's going to be available on several exchanges. We hold several
several licenses. That's sort of like back you know, this institutional braid really
trusted compliance first aspects to it. Recently acquired standard custody and with that a
New York trust lies and we have like forty you know, money transmitted license
in the US, we have an m AS payment license draw and then so
this Ripple stable coin can be expected to be listed on several exchanges. Minting
directly with Ripple will be available for like institutional grade enterprise customers. Yeah,
in in in the early stages as well. Now you mentioned the acquisition of
certain custodian standard custody. I know there's Medico as well. Tell Us about
how the reserves for the stable coin will be custodied and what will the reserves
ben consist of. Yes, so so we'll definitely look to kind of like
you know, uh, you know, be given the compliance first sort of
like mindset that we have been operating on the since the day one, will
definitely look to be on par with you know, the best industry standards,
will look to produce monthly audits. It's going to be back by cash equivalents,
you know, like treasuries, vl US dollars and so forth, and
you know, it's going to be evolving like with other tivon US dollar stable
coins in terms of like how these can be integrated and backed, you know,
working with the financial system together over time and just kind of like solving
for you know, higher trusts. In terms of the vehicle it represents for
use in in you know, DeFi use cases and institutional great use cases mhm.
And in regards to a market availability, I'm assuming it will be available
globally. And I guess the sec tertiary or secondary question to that is with
the recent issue of the EU stable coin regulations and so forth, and there's
potentially some coming into that in the United States. How is Ripple ensuring it's
going to be in alignment with those Yeah, so look for the risk of
sounding a bit repetitive here, but like compliance is very important for us.
We are a compliant first company. We have been since tay one. We
have been engaging with regulators and we will continue to engage with regulators around the
world. And so you know, we're definitely covering the relevant angles to make
sure the Ripple stable Coin is compliant wherever it's offered, and we're going to
be you know, working towards increasing the scope geographic scope over time obviously,
and we're in a lucky position that you know, a lot of the work
we've done around payments can be leveraged directly for the Ripple stable coin in terms
of the licenses we acquired, in terms of the regulatory relationships and formal partnerships
we've been building over the last ten years, and so we'll definitely look to
you know, lean into app and harness all all these you know, partnerships
we built, including also on off ramping. By the way, we've built
up a huge network of on off ramping functions for our payments product, and
so that's going to surf as well as well in terms of, like,
you know, solving as much problems in the world as possible with this new
launch off the Ripple USOLO stable coin. So along those lines, I think
you hinted towards growing. My next question would be how are you planning to
gain market share against established players like Circle and Tether and the paypals that just
launched less. I love that question. I'll start by saying, the global
stable coin market gap is what around like one hundred and fifty billion the total
amount of US dollar right now, just US dollar loan in the world.
If you look at M zero, M one and to money supply, that's
like twenty one to twenty two trillion dollars. So why am I saying this.
I'm saying this because like we're not so much thinking about, oh my
god, how is this going to compete with you know, USDC and UST,
but more about like, hey, this pie is going to grow so
much better, bigger right than it is right now. And so we look
at you know, we think USDC is going to continue to be here and
that's great. We look at these dynamics more as like co opetition than you
know, competition and you know, we're we feel very confident in terms of
like the pedigree we have as a company, the track record we've built,
the use cases we have already built up over you know, a decade now
that this Ripple stable clind will play an important role in terms of like transforming
financial markets. And one of the things that as far as blockchains, you're
launching on obviously the XRP later, but also ethereum tell us about the decision
to include etherorem and then are the plans to expand to other blockchains as things
as time progressive. Yeah, so look, I think the first segment I
want to make is we are and we will continue to be XRPL. First.
Why is that because we believe XRPL has been designed with you know,
like compliance in mind, with like institutional great features in mind. And I
can give you examples to that. And it's kind of like demonstrated by the
fact that Ripple is one of the few large scale enterprise grade use cases live
you know, fueling billions of dollars of useful economic activity powered by the XRP
letter, right, And so we believe it's designed to do these things really
well. We also believe that you know, the future of the financial system
powered by blockchain technology will be multi chain and not the kind of like one
chain to rule them all. You know, that will be kind of like
recreating the same problem almost that we have with you know, the traditional financial
system, which suffers from fragmentations into networks that don't really seamlessly interoperate with each
other. And so we think you know, an issuance on etherory and will
provide cross chain interoperability which will benefit you know, the economy at large,
and obviously it will benefit also the XPL Ripple, the industry at bigger scale
and so and obviously Ethereum is sort of like, you know, one of
the chains with the most dominant sort of like unchained financial activity in our day
h right now. So that's kind of like why it made sense for us
to go for these two chains. And over time, you know, that
may grow. But again X and P letter is you know, the blockchain
the number one blockchain of choice for Ripple, and that's going to continue to
be the case, and that's what we're predominantly focused on. Yeah, for
sure. Now in the United States, there's not clarity around stable coins or
market structure, right it's a bit of a mess with the SEC. You
get the industry suing the SEC, the SEC suing the industry until Congress acts,
you know, everybody's trying to figure things out here. Are there any
concerns that the SEC may come after Ripple regarding the stable coin because there have
been some comments and Chair answer that he believes stable coins are securities. Now
that's not an official directive from the SEC, but there's certainly uncertainty in the
air. Yeah, I wouldn't say there's concerns. Know, it's obviously unfortunate
that the SEC has played a role of like, you know, stifling innovation
quite a bit over the last couple of years. You know, if you
look at that through the lens of you know, innovation and also just particularly
the crypto industry. Yeah, it's definitely not been a positive thing and it's
just unfortunate to see it feels like the US could be way more leading,
a leading force, may more dominance, similar to what has happened in the
Internet era, right, And I would say, you know, that's paid
off very well for the US at large, and so you know, again
we're like we're launching the Ripples stable kon like we've launched any of our products
with a compliance first mindset. We are in touch with the relevant regulates and
will continue to be, and we'll make sure we play by the book like
we have with payments and everything else we've been doing. Now, let's talk
a bit about stable coin adoption and what the future looks like. I have
many thoughts about it, but I know that I'm in the crypto bubble where
I'm thinking about the tokens a lot. But then I think about the average
person on the street. They don't necessarily need to know that a stable coin
is what they're using, but maybe it's running behind the scenes. It's providing
the instant settlement, it's fast, it's cheaper than the solutions out there,
and it's less friction. Do you envision it as that you know that the
majority of people outside of crypto, they will not necessarily know that they're using
a stable coin, but it just runs behind the scenes. Yeah, thank
you for saying that. I think you know if you look at the state
of our industry. So the first thing I will say is we need to
bring these worlds together. Right Like crypto and blockchain as a technology is not
going to transform the financial system if we just focus on the crypto worse and
we kind of like client drive it from there. The second thing I will
say is, you know, like with the Internet, for blockchain technology to
power the financial system at large, people shouldn't have to go through clunky you
know, user interfaces and need to learn about blockchain technology stuff shiites work right,
And so I think we as an industry, you know, we've gotten
to a point where, hey, we've reached critical mass. It's pretty clear
to anyone right now, including regulators, crypto and blockchain technology is here to
stay, and it's sort of happening. I think the next you know,
like five or ten years, what we increasingly need to think about us innovatives
in the crypto industry is this notion of abstraction and abstracting away the layers.
So people don't really understand, you know, that they're now operating on a
blockchain power it sort of like financial infrastructure. But they just realized, wow,
stuff is so much faster. Stuff is you know, so much cheaper,
and it's so much more accessible. And I think, like, you
know, we're on the path to get there, but there's still lots lots
of work ahead. And the logic I kind of have is like, hey,
the more time we can spend in terms of the value chain of use
cases on a blockchain power, financial infrastructure, the more we get to harness
you know, all the beautiful things around efficiencies, access and all these things.
But it's going to be a trade off in the beginning in terms of
like how much decentralization and these aspects we can you know, basically use and
how much intermediation is still required to make sure users are safe, you know,
it's compliant with regulatory frameworks and things like that, and that pendulum will
probably you know, just to move over time. And so what we really
care about and what we have been caring about since the begainning is we want
to make a difference in the real economy today using blockchain technology, and therefore
we want to work with the system, and you know, sometimes that means
compromising a little bit of like pure peer to peer and building in some trust
anchors to get to you know, to kind of like make a difference today.
I don't know if you can answer this question, and you probably can't
tell us much. But Ripple obviously he's working with some big institutions around the
globe. Are you already in talks about how they can potentially use this stable
coin and kind of what we're talking about it is running behind the scenes.
Let's do a small trial and error test for this market and see how customers
like it. You know, if it's running behind the app, you know,
whether it's one of your bank clients, your credit card clients, and
so forth. Yeah. So, so look, with our payments product,
we have already we introduced some stable coins, you know, as an alternative
or addition to XRP, and so we have that experience already and in some
use cases, you know, it works better. And what we want to
like, what we're here to do is solving problem around financial friction to people.
And we focus obviously on businesses as our primary customers, and so whenever
we can do to solve their problem, that's what we're going to be going
for. And XMP works really really well, and it works well in many
of the use cases, and we feel, you know, by pairing it
up with Ripple stable coin predominantly issued on XP Ledger, we can do way
more and that will also benefit XRP in return. And certainly, like you
know, we're having these conversations with all our you know, traditional financial institutional
customers that we have using the payment product. And what's interesting as well is
so if you think of Ripple, you know, our insertion point has been
payments. It's still our flagship product. But today Ripple is much more than
kind of like a payments company using crypto in the form of XP because you
know, we we do own a costly business. We have core competence in
a later one blockchain that's designed to support institutional grade financial you know, kind
of like use cases. And so if you pair all these things together,
you know, you end up with a company that essentially playing a leading role
as sort of like this digital asset infrastructure provider to financial services at large,
like a holistic sort of one stop shop to provide simple, secure and compliance
solutions to bring sort of like track file chain. M Yeah, I mean,
it's exciting, what's coming. It's a brave new world. And then
let's talk a bit about the XRPL, because you know, there was things
like automated market making am amm excuse me launched earlier this year. Tell us
a bit about that and how that's been going. So maybe I can start
with just like you know, some macro points about the xp ledger how we're
thinking about it. So, first of all, we're working and contributing to
the xp ledger alongside a community of you know, thousands of hundreds of thousands
of developers. There's more than one thousand, seven hundred apps and services building
on the xp ledger. And you know, what we're kind of like working
towards is to see the xp ledger as sort of like the go to blockchain
for institutional grade financial businesses. That's kind of like you know, the positioning.
The way we're working towards that with the community is obviously there's existing features
that you know, what's particular about the exhibit lecture. They are all natively
baked into the protocol, which brings with it more security than for example,
through a smart contract on the surface. It also helps aggregate liquidity on the
protocol level. And so there's been a native decentralized exchange with the Central Limit
Order BROOK since day one, since twenty twelve, is actually the first decentralized
exchange in the world. We complemented it like what you refer to with an
automated market maker, with some really innovative features and it has a symbiotic sort
of black relationship with the central limit order book. It's integrated together with the
payments engine, and so we're super excited that is now life and going.
And separately, we're working together with the community to bring other additional what we
call institution great financial primitives on the xp ledger. One of them that's public
in your own is lending protocol, so it's basically going to be again a
native baked into the protocol lending protocol that we're working towards. We're also released
some compliance features like the centralized identity standards. We provided price Oracle support,
and again we'reducing Mother Research for just to continue to evolve that sort of like
institutional grade roadmap. And then so if you have these additional financial primitives their
institutional break coming on the protocol, you have a growing DeFi community of developers
that want to solve for trad fed problems. If you have you know,
more high grade, highly regulated financial assets coming to the XPP ledger and companies
like Ripple plugging more deeply directly into xpl to power payments and beyond, then
you can see how this creates a fly veel of powering like you know,
real all financial activity at scale, and so that's kind of like what we're
what we're working towards, and what we're super excited about. Yeah, exciting
stuff. I did want to ask you, with the limited time to get
left about et apps. Yeah, I would love to get your perspective on
how the impact of the big one et aps going live. We get the
partial approve of the etherermytfs here in the United States, and then there's talks
of a Solana and of course an ex er p ETF. Want to get
your take on all that. Yeah, So my first reaction is this is
so exciting for everyone in the crypto industry. It's kind of like somebody at
the PANNEL I was Earlierer here said it's like a free trade agreement between tat
FYE and crypto, and I think that was pretty pretty well described. I
think it's as well a huge testament in terms of like, you know,
how far we've come, and also that like, hey, you know,
crypto as an investment class is mainstream, right, It's no longer just like
yeah, somewhere somewhere random, some people, some crazies are invessing in crypto.
I think like something like forty percent of people in the US now on
crypto, So I think that's kind of like we've reached mainstream. My second
reaction to it is like, hey, all of this is only where something
if crypto solves problems at scale and if this stuff is actually useful, right,
the value of crypto is a direct correlation to the you know, the
size of the problem these blockchain networks and native assets are able to solve.
And that's what I'm focused on with as my role of repelex, Like I
want to solve real we all financial problems using blockchain technology. And that's kind
of like, yeah, what gets me super excited. But yeah, it
was amazing to see the turnaround on the on the EU you know ETF and
look, I you know, in relation to XP, I think XP is
obviously, you know, a pretty evident candidate. It's one of the has
been one of the leading cryptocurrencies in terms of like market cap, in terms
of like you know, daily volume for twelve years now. And it's the
only asset, you know, crypto asset that had to go through that level
of scrutiny, regulatory through the courts and obtained that level of clarity with the
ruling by the court last year that XP in and by itself is not a
security and so it feels like pretty evident that it's somewhere on the list.
Do you think we see that XRP ETF in twenty twenty five? I hope
so, I've I've no you know, firm timeline there in place. And
again like I think, you know on the periphery, these kind of products
are very important. The thing that gets me out of bed in the morning
is how we're going to be able to you know, build it better or
transform towards a better financial system using these technologies and using these assets. Yeah,
for sure, Marcus, I got some wrap up questions here for you.
First, if you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme
be. That's a good question. I think something like you know, traveling
back through you know, any time in history, or even more exciting,
being able to explore space and like you know, go through a wormhole,
see what happens, jump into a black hole and see how it feels to
be torn into a spaghetti So that that would be pretty awesome. Yeah,
I have the same Those are like mine too, like space and time to
be able to go be immersed into I don't know, we go back to
the fifteen hundreds and see what life was like. You know that that'll be
pretty much looks like we should be hanging out more often. Tony for sure.
Rapid fire questions, favorite food Tayler RENI with why truffle in Piamont Prevor
musician or band. They're called Timothy and Raphael. They're six and seven years
old. They're my family band. One place the violin, one place the
keyboard, and they're hyperactive, so definitely keeps you on your toes. Favorite
movie, good question. So I'm a space guy, as you know,
I really liked Interstellar in terms of, like, hey, exploring the younglan,
pushing you know, like courageously beyond what's known, and also sort of
like the fact that they're actually used some of the top scientists to kind of
like articulate and tell the whole movie. And there's also these elements about like
you know, these very intense human emotions about love and sacrifice and all these
things. So I thought it was like a really well made movie. Yeah,
it's one of my favorite favorite book. Favorite book. I do tons
of audiobooks. Maybe I'll tell you the last one and I thought was really
good, which was the Cold Star Problem by Andrew Chen who was the head
of growth at Uber. I think, and now it's at in Recent Horbits
and it's a book about network effects. And I would say anyone in crypto
working on protocols, this has got to be a bible. It's it's just
like, even if it's wet to oriented that there's a lot of good lessons
for uh yeah, for what we're trying to do. I'll have to check
that out because I've often talked about Metcalfs law and network effects and how it's
so applicable to crypto and blockchains. Yeah, and when you're not working at
Ripple, what are you doing for fun? My favorite thing to do is
skiing. Nothing beats like you know, blue sky, fresh powder, Swiss
Alps and the ski under your your your feet. Unfortunately, it's something I
do like you know, a week a year or something, so, but
yeah, that's my favorite thing. Awesome, Marcus, A pleasure chatting with
you. I'm super excited for launch of the r l USD stable coin.
We'll have to have you back on later this year once they got But thank
you so much for joining me. Thank you Tony. Spent a lot of
fun at tak Pak. Takes a task to task, post to stand