At Ripple, our vision is to make money move as quickly and easily as information does today – we call it Internet of Value. When we announced the next evolution of Xpring as Ripple’s open developer platform in October, we reflected on what it truly meant to bring money to the Internet. The Internet is: global, counter-party free, open, reliable, and interoperable.
Global. To truly enable the Internet of Value, Xpring has to be global as well. That’s when we set our eyes toward engaging with developers in Asia.
One month later, the Xpring team is fresh off a week-long visit to Singapore where we attended three conferences: Singapore FinTech Festival, CoinMarketCap’s inaugural global event The Capital, and Blockshow Asia. We attended a series of speaker events, as well as met many developers in Asia who are excited about building on Xpring and using XRP/ILP.
During a long 14-hour flight back home to San Francisco, we got together and reflected on our three biggest takeaways on blockchain and crypto from our time in Singapore.
1. Expanded offerings from crypto wallets
During Blockshow Asia, our friends at crypto.com announced their new crypto exchange in Hong Kong along with their token-fundraising platform called the Syndicate. These are two new offerings to add to their expanding product suite of payments, lending, merchant payment processing, and investing – with the plan of offering a holistic financial experience for consumers.
We’re seeing a growing number of crypto wallets offer new products to add to their core wallet functionality – from POS payments (e.g., TenX, Nexo, Bitpay) to lending (e.g., BlockFi, Celsius). They’re addressing a salient customer need of wanting a one-stop-shop for their financial needs as opposed to the myriad of apps that they currently use – irrespectively of crypto or non-crypto financial services.
2. Continued focus on interoperability
Da Hongfei from NEO had a great keynote speech to kick off Blockshow Asia on the two biggest problems that the Internet faces today: horizontal isolation and vertical friction. Horizontal isolation is the creation of silos that cannot speak to each other easily. We see this problem in payments today, where proprietary and siloed networks cannot easily communicate between themselves. This makes activities like cross-border payments incredibly slow today. Vertical friction is the technological barrier between truly connecting the physical and digital worlds. We also see this problem in payments where payment processors struggle to offer a seamless checkout experience across channels (from brick-and-mortar to web to mobile).
One of the solutions that Da Hongfei proposes is an interoperability layer that can link together global ledgers like digital assets and traditional payment networks. We fully agree with Da Hongfei’s call for interoperability. In order to enable the Internet of Value, we need true interoperability like what the Internet has. That’s why at Xpring, we’re building tools and services to easily build on the Interledger Protocol (ILP), a standardized payment protocol that connects any currency – fiat or digital asset.
3. Continued focus on improving the developer experience
Nearly every crypto company and developer we spoke to in Singapore mentioned the need to improve the developer experience in crypto. Powerful anecdotes were shared – from spending hours setting up a node to convoluted steps to secure money in a wallet to limited documentation for tools.
We see this as a major blocker for mainstream developer adoption, and we’re actively working on improving the developer experience by making it as easy as possible to use XRP and Interledger. Our SDK allows developers to use XRP/ILP in any programming language. Our hope is that all of our developer tools will abstract away the complexity of blockchain so that any developer can easily use and understand the functionality that blockchain enables him or her.
About Xpring
Xpring is creating an open platform for money to make it easy for developers to integrate payments into their applications. Xpring builds upon open-source core technologies like XRP, Web Monetization, and Interledger to allow for sending and receiving real time payments in any currency. Learn more at our website. Follow us on Twitter to stay updated on our progress.
