Name: Ripple president on stablecoins, Trump and tokenization
Uploaded: 2025-06-20T17:43:09.000Z
Duration: 30 min 47 s
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I mean, certainly the macro environment has become very volatile, like you're explaining, and uncertain.

Do you think the industry is on a lot more solid footing than it was when we saw the sort of last downturn?

In terms of like any specific risks to the crypto ecosystem, we're in a sturdier place.

Ripple was one of the early players in the cryptocurrency scene, and it was set up to be an alternative to Bitcoin specifically for payments.

It began life focusing on cross-border payments, also using the cryptocurrency XRP.

Now it's expanding into everything from custody to stable coins and tokenization.

We'll dig in to what those terms mean and why Ripple sees them as the future.

I'm very excited because this is amongst one of our first video versions of Beyond the Valley.

It's going to be on YouTube on CNBC.com, and we're here recording it at Paris Blockchain Week.

Now, my guest has been in the industry for more than a decade, so she's got a lot of insight.

Monica Long, president of Ripple, thank you so much for joining me on Beyond the Valley.

So Monica, I just said there, you've been in the industry for 12 years nearly?

Before you were in PR, what made you make the switch?

Yes, so I started my career at a PR agency.

When I was at that agency, Prosper was one of my clients.

So if you remember, this was one of the early person-to-person lending marketplaces.

The co-founder and CEO was a guy named Chris Larson.

He's a serial fintech entrepreneur in the Valley.

So before that, he'd founded E-Loan, but I loved working with him.

It was all about bringing personal loans back to community banking roots, and it just really resonated with me what Chris's vision was.

And as a leader, an entrepreneur, I had a good relationship with him, just a good bond.

So years later, I went to Intuit, a different tech company, in the interim.

And then when he started Ripple, I was catching up with him one day just to learn about what he was doing.

And I remember that meeting so well because, I mean, one, he was explaining the concepts of Bitcoin and blockchain and why he saw this as the most important revolution in finance in more than 50 years.

So I joined Ripple about 12 years ago as our director of communications.

What have been the biggest changes you've seen over that time in the industry?

Yeah, I wish I kept a diary so I could remember all the ups and downs more.

But in broad strokes, I can say, I mean, it's been an oddly short, long time.

But then when you think about the scale of transformation that's meant to happen, that's underway with blockchain and crypto, it kind of does make sense that it's taken, you know, many years, decades even, to get to the place where we are.

One, I mean, I remember in 2014, we started to try to, we knocked on the doors of banks and we explained to them this proposition of, hey, you could do cross-border payments on a blockchain and it would be like near instant, almost free for those FX transactions.

But they were like, slammed the door in our face.

They were not ready for that conversation.

And today, of course, you know, it's a very different world.

Banks understand that this is going to be the future of finance.

And then also, I mean, obviously, this space has just blossomed so much since then.

You kind of mentioned, I mean, the original XRP Ledger launched as, I think the three guys who made it called it like Bitcoin 2.0.

So like in their brains, they were thinking of Bitcoin is this ingenious invention.

How can we improve upon scalability and like tinker with the consensus model so that you could, you know, enable things like an exchange within the blockchain itself.

So that, you know, that was one of the first altchains to ever launch.

Thousands, tens of thousands of different chains and projects and layers of the blockchain cake.

I've been covering this for about 10 years and there's been some wild stories in the industry, right?

I mean, there was kind of one hit after the other.

And yeah, I think that there, you know, as the industry has even grown and whatnot, you still hear from, you know, everyday people or from some of our political leaders and whatnot, a view of crypto that is like, it's all bad news.

But I think that those voices are getting fewer and they're getting quieter.

Like, I think that the idea that there is opportunity to do good things with the technology is definitely more of the rising tide.

Some of our listeners who don't know too much about Ripple, what you do.

We are mostly on the commercial side, focused on bringing digital asset infrastructure to financial institutions.

So I mentioned, you know, Chris's big vision, like what was this thing all about?

And he talked about the idea that we have an Internet for information.

So the ability for us to exchange information and communicate with each other fast and free all around the world, that the real innovation within blockchain is just that, but for money.

So being able to represent different assets and forms of money and exchange them near free instantly around the world.

And so that's kind of like the big idea that we've all been working on all these years.

And now I forget what your original question was.

Which is just, I think there's a lot of people hadn't heard about Ripple, but this is what, you know, this is part of what your product's about, right?

Using these blockchain technologies to...

Yeah, to modernize infrastructure for financial institutions.

So the thing is, is it's not realistic that the existing systems like banks are going to plug directly into the blockchain.

It's things like getting from, you know, real world currency, fiat currency into digital asset currency.

It's providing, you know, stable coins and even, you know, services for the institutions to be able to tokenize assets.

So it's providing that that layer of services that they need.

In addition, we, you know, the whole thing, the whole company started because three developers created the XRP ledger, which we were talking about.

And so we've always had a belief in, you know, building use cases that would make use of the efficiency within XRP ledger.

So the set of services I'm talking about and the use cases that financial institutions would use would be, you know, presumably on this ledger.  And of course, XRP is the digital asset associated with the XRP ledger as well.

And that's used in some of your products as well, right?

Let's get into the bigger picture first as well, Monica, because I want to talk to you the stable coin you've launched, about the real world asset tokenization.

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