Ripple chief strategist: US government is very positive about XRP and ripple tuned

Cory Johnson, Ripple’s new chief market strategist for eight months has conducted a very interesting interview with Breaker. He explained that the US government under Trump is very positive about Ripple and XRP. As Johnson explained, there are regular discussions between Ripple and regulators, as well as with politicians.

His job as chief market strategist is to educate the public about Ripple. When he started his new job eight months ago, he had “come across shit tons of FUD” surrounding the company and the crypto currency XRP. On the other hand, the public tends to equate the company Ripple with the XRP token. On the other hand, the issue of decentralization would very often be misrepresented simply because Ripple owns 60 percent of the XRP supply.

Independent of this, however, Ripple was able to achieve great success. On the launch of xRapid and the question of how long it will take for major banks to use the product, he explains (translated freely):

We definitely already have big banks on the platform: Standard Chartered; Santander, the largest bank in Spain; Itaú[Unibanco], the largest bank in Brazil (note: the banks belong to RippleNet). But when you travel in Asia or the Middle East, you see changing companies on every corner. This is because banks are not the way money moves in these countries – it is moved by companies that make remittances. What we see are many and many smaller companies – those I’ve never heard of before, before I started registering and using our software. It won’t be the big, established players at first.

In response to the question of what the White House and Trump government think about Ripple, Johnson explained:

I was really surprised about the open-mindedness. Secondly, I was surprised at the intelligent questions, sometimes even the difficult questions. There’s clearly a lot of homework to do. In particular, the White House seems to be thinking about what it means that 80 percent of Bitcoin mining takes place in China and much of ether mining takes place in China. If you look at XRP, there is no mining, so XRP is a completely different thing from the point of view of outside control or from the point of view of the environment. And in conversations we’ve had with the administration, they seem to understand that and think that could be important.

With regard to Ripple’s contacts with the government and the level of discussion, Johnson refused to go into more detail. Nevertheless, he revealed that Ripple himself is well networked in political circles:

I am Episcopal, and the joke is that we are not talking about God or money, but we have many of both. So I’m not gonna say who we talked to. But we are in regular talks across Washington, and we meet both regulators and politicians. We have a whole team dedicated to this task, not only in the USA, but worldwide. Our regulation team, they jump into planes as if their pants would burn.

When asked what is his most unpopular question that journalists can ask him, Johnson called the question about the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) classification of XRP. He believes that it is not unlikely that Ripple will never get a rating for the XRP token:

And I think it’s possible that the answer never comes. I don’t know if the SEC will be able to comment and make a decision on every single crypto currency or every single digital asset. I don’t know if they like what they did to Bitcoin and Ether. I would suspect that an administrative authority would not want to take over the regulation of a whole new part of the world if no one asked it to do so and no one would increase their budget for it.

If you are interested, you can find the full interview with Breaker here.