Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, shared his predictions about the future of bitcoin with a CNBC correspondent. In his opinion, bitcoin will play a role in the future, but it should not be considered a universal tool that will solve all problems.
"I think it's (bitcoin) not going to be the panacea that people once thought it would be, where it would solve all of these different kind of problems... Instead, you're seeing specializations of different kind of ledgers, different kinds of blockchains," Garlinghouse said at the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
He also compared bitcoin and the XPR (TIKER: XRP.EXANTE) digital token. Garlinghouse said that blockchain, the technology behind the most famous cryptocurrency, is "quite slow," while XRP transactions are "a thousand times faster."
However, at the same time, he stressed that he does not consider this a "holy war" of one cryptocurrency against another.
"Well, I don't really think about it as one versus the other. I mean, it's actually unfortunate, I think, that there's some people in this, the crypto space, the blockchain space — for them, it's almost a holy war of one versus the other. I don't look at that at all," he added.
The XRP currency and San Francisco-based Ripple, which develops a network for faster global financial payments, were founded by the same people. Garlinghouse stressed that Ripple does not depend on the XRP (TIKER: XRP.EXANTE) token.
Yesterday it became known that Ripple has commited to donating $50 million to 17 leading universities to boost academic blockchain research. Interestingly, the donation will be conducted in dollars, not in XPR.
Recall that in May, Ripple announced results from several early xRapid pilots and xRapid technology, which have turned out to be successful. In an official statement, Ripple said that participating financial organizations would save between 40%-70% in comparison to the costs they would normally incur if they used the services of traditional providers.
By Ekaterina Ulyanova