Over the past decade, we have witnessed the emergence of revolutionary technologies and innovation. This decade was full of technological advances, from smartphones to drones, AI, Cloud, online streaming, electric and self-driving vehicles + many more, and finally blockchain technology and digital assets. For the past 4 decades we moved from simple PCs to the Internet to Social media and now to Blockchain.

After the financial crisis, people were exhausted and tired of the current broken and corrupted financial system. Fiat money didn't “work” anymore and letting banks printing money out of thin air didn't had good results. A liquidity crisis occured and what did the governments do? Not only they didn't solved the problem, but instead they only did some marginal improvements on regulations and printed and injected trillions and trillions of dollars to the markets for the next few years which was mainly to save banks with the hope that this will solve and restore everything. After so much corruption, inflation, no transparency and many more, It was time for a change. Bitcoin was created and this was the start of a revolution with the goal of open and decentralized (digital) money for all with transparency and security. As Satoshi Nakamoto described it in the whitepaper, a P2P electronic cash system.

We all know what happened next. Bitcoin got popular, many other digital assets were created and many blockchain companies were formed. Two of the most important ones? Ripple and XRP. The creators of the XRP Ledger saw a few problems with Bitcoin in 2011, so they decided to built a better one that it wouldn't have the Bitcoin flaws like the lack of scalability, the unecessary mining and PoW that was vulnerable in 51% attack. After they started building the XRP Ledger, they formed a company with the goal to solve a big problem: cross-border payments.

Moving money was very costly, time consuming and opaque. The internet of information is great but it has a big weakness: You can not store and move value efficiently and without an intermediary. Until digital assets came along, no one had the ability to move value at a distance without the permission and support of a third party. This is the core of what blockchain technology makes possible. This simple, but revolutionary idea of instant value transfer.

Ripple had started another revolution and that was the Internet of Value. Working within the system and trying to change how the financial system worked from inside, was a big deal and that was how real change could only happen and be allowed. For those unfamiliar with the term “Internet of Value”, as Ripple describes it in simple words, it is moving value like information moves today. We could share information and send messages instantly but we still couldn't move money efficiently. And unfortunately, this is true until today in a big part of the world.

How has Internet of Value evolved since then?

Interledger Protocol (ILP) which was built in 2015, was the foundation of the Internet of Value in order to make it truly efficient. We can't enable IoV if there is no interoperability among the different networks and ledgers that exist. There are different layers which are all important and complementary as we can see in this pyramid:

Having interoperability and the right scalability + the right digital asset we can have a fully efficient and instant value transfer. XRP Ledger has been proven to be the most reliable, stable and scalable blockchain throughout all these years, which means that using Interledger Protocol with the features of XRP Ledger (payment channels etc.) and with the digital asset XRP as a settlement tool (bridge currency), we can have truly efficient payments and movement of value all around the world. Only with the right tools, Internet of Value can be enabled and be efficient:

Bitcoin was the start, the napster of cryptocurrencies as Brad Garlinghouse has said, but other digital assets and companies will lead and push the industry to mass adoption and eventually maturity. Ripple and XRP are two of the best examples.

Moving to remmitances, according to the World Bank, the money workers send home to their families from abroad has become a critical part of many economies around the world. Remittances have reached a record high of $551 billion in low- and middle-income countries in 2019, up by 60.6% compared to 2010.

So, moving value cheaply, fast and securely enough is more critical than ever before. The average cost of sending money is still very high at 6.9%

Changing these, will impact these people signifcantly.

The Next Decade

As the calendar turns to 2020 and we move to the next decade, we can't but be confident and optimistic of what we will see unfolding. We will certainly see further Decentralization and disintermediation. The blockchain and digital assets industry is maturing year by year and with Ripple leading the industry and having made a huge progress and with XRP building more and more liquidity and revealing its power to more and more people we can only expect extraordinary things. The only barrier at the moment is regulations, but governments and Central Banks can't ignore them anymore as they have also started working in their own DLT systems and CBDCs. The next decade will bring the masses to blockchain and digital assets.

The ultimate goal is one: Being interconnected with each other and being able to share and move value as easy as information moves today. Will the vision of Internet of Value be completed the next decade? It seems certain, but only time will tell.