Rj

"Ripple has 300+ bank partnerships, but after 13 years, shouldn't there be billions in daily on-chain volume?" I think there are a number of reasons why institutions have historically preferred to use digital assets off chain rather than on chain. I think we're close to changing that because institutions are starting to see the benefits of moving on chain. But I agree it has been very slow. Even Ripple can't use the XRPL DEX for payments yet because we can't be sure a terrorist won't provide the liquditity for payment. Features like permissioned domains will address this. "If XRP is volatile, why use it over stablecoins for transfers?" There are use cases where volatility isn't a minus, or is even a plus. Generally, for most digital assets the general view is that the upside is worth more than the downside, so as long as you aren't very risk averse, holding it is not really a disadvantage. "If volatility is not an issue because it’s a bridge currency, what is the incentive to hold it?" A bridge currency only works if someone is holding it so that you can get it precisely when you need it. But I think that in practice if you don't know what asset you will need to hold next, you may hold the dominant bridge currency because it should be cheaper to exchange into whatever you happen to need next. "Are bridge currencies still necessary when stablecoins will cover most pairs in the future?" If one stablecoin wins, then no. You would just use that stablecoin as the bridge currency. But I don't think one stablecoin can win for several reasons, including that a stablecoin can only be stable relative to one particular fiat currency and will always have jurisdictional ties. If we're in a multi-stablecoin world, it still makes sense to have a bridge asset that serves the long tail of tokenized securities, loan portfolios, and so on. "Why would giants like BlackRock use XRPL for tokenization instead of building their own blockchain? (Robinhood uses Arbitrum and plans their own)" I'm not sure how much that will really matter so long as we have interoperability and asset portability. Multiple chains are a good form of scalability as well. But I think the best way to see why they might is to ask the same question about Circle -- why don't they launch USDC only on their own blockchain? You can see why that's obviously silly. I think the same kind of logic will apply to tokenized real world assets over the next year or two. "Geopolitical risk. Why would foreign countries trust a US based private company payment network?" If you're asking about XRPL, it's not really US based. It has never discriminated against any particular participant and if it ever started to, I would hope people would stop using it. If you mean Ripple's enterprise payment products, we have separately licensed entities in many jurisdictions. But obviously, you're not going to see it in North Korea or Cuba any time soon and their might be, in some cases, pushback to a US company having some control over, say, payments between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. We build trust and we make hay where the sun shines.