2018-11-18 09:19 |
The former CTO of Ripple, Stefan Thomas, recently gave an interview where he explained his reasons for leaving Ripple.
In a podcast with Epicenter, Thomas spoke at length about why he left Ripple. He also explained his current project, micropayment platform Coil.
Thomas, the founder of Coil, was joined by Coil’s CTO, Ben Sharafian. Sharafian is also a former Ripple employee.
What kind of unique insight do the pair have about working at Ripple? Why did the two choose to leave the payment processing company? What’s the status of their current project?
One of the reasons for leaving Ripple was that the focus of the company was on corporations – not necessarily consumers.
“I think they’re [Ripple] very focused on use cases around the digital asset XRP as well as enterprise use cases. So making payments more efficient for banks, payment service providers, their customers, corporates and so on.”
After leaving Ripple, Thomas chose to develop on Inter Ledger. He later released XRP Ledger before founding Coil.
During the podcast, Thomas spoke about his experience working with Ripple, including the focuses of the international payment technology company.
Many of Thomas’s responses focused on a similar pain point: Ripple is focused on banks and corporate customers while Thomas wanted to focus on consumers.
As reported by AMB Crypto,
“[Thomas] said that eventually, his research team and Ripple mutually realized that banks are inclined towards in suiting their customers interests. Meanwhile, most of the banking sector have larger corporates as their most significant group of consumer [sic], this class is not practically best suited for the use-cases offered by Inter Ledger.”
That’s why Thomas chose to develop on Inter Ledger.
“And so if you think about Ledger, we talked earlier what are the things that Inter Ledger is best at. If you think of it as a thing that enables like a new class of use cases – kind of how the Internet enabled a new class of communication use cases – it’s unlikely that large corporations are going to necessarily be the very first to adopt that.”
Should Consumers Or Corporates Be The Focus?Stefan Thomas’s decision to leave Ripple was spurred by his desire to focus on consumers – not major corporations and big banks.
This leads to the question: which sector should you focus on as a crypto company? Should you focus on big corporations and major financial institutions first? Or should you start at the grassroots level, targeting consumers and growing until banks and corporations can no longer ignore you?
You can download the latest episode of the crypto-focused Epicenter podcast here: epicenter.tv/
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