Continuation Of Future Forum 2018 Leads To Discussion Of Ripple And XRP By Governor Mark Carney

“Money is evolving.” That is the first sentiment that readers come across when visiting the official website for the Bank of England, leading them to the Future Forum 2018. The public was encouraged to take part in this discussion through registrations and sending in questions, providing their opinions and concerns about the future path of money. On January 8th, Governor Mark Carney took his place to discuss this topic, during which time XRP arose.

The discussion, “Have your say on the future of money,” brought in questions about how the Bank of England plans to handle cross-border payments in the future. Considering that Ripple has massively taken over in the financial and cryptocurrency world with their fast cross-border payments, it is natural to bring it into the discussion.

Carney commented,

“Money is evolving, and so is the way we pay and the financial services we want… Bank notes will remain a central form of payment for some time…”

A user, Steve, posted a question –

“How does the BofE view the increased utility of digital assets (e.g. the use of XRP through RippleNet as a bridging asset for cross border payments and transfers) and is the BofE working towards the use of a digital asset to perform this or any other monetary tasks?”

In response, Carney said that there was an existing partnership set up with Ripple in 2017, helping the financial institution to explore their options for digital assets, distributed ledger technology, machine learning, and other concepts.

Continuing, Carney explained,

“For that proof-of-concept study, we looked at whether two transactions in different currencies could be executed simultaneously in separate RTGS systems. The important test is that, if one of the synchronized transactions fails to go through, the other part should not go through. That shows the system is working properly and could in principle be used for cross-currency conversions.”

Carney’s discussion was meant to be a collaboration of the questions that have already been asked. However, it was open to other questions, especially to clear up anything from the talks that had preceded it.

Overall, this concept alone could reduce fees and transaction times. Victoria Cleland, the executive director for banking, payments, and financial resilience at the Bank of England, discussed “Proof of Concept.” She noted,

“We do want to make sure is that when there are sort of participants or systems who one sort of plug into RTGS that they can do so using DLT so the proof of concepts that we ran over the summer really trying to say if somebody wants to connect to us from a DLT system can that work and the really good news was that it can.”

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