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Do you know David Schwartz? If you do not recognize his name, maybe you'll know about him with the name of his company: Ripple, do you ring a bell? If you follow the crypto-market, surely it does. Recently, Schwartz gave a recent interview to the media in which he was called "trillion dollars" . Why? Because he wants to conquer a market of one trillion dollars.
According to the interview, David Schwartz was obsessed with handles and locks when he was a child It was not a strange obsession, mind you, he just wanted to know how they worked, he used a screwdriver to disassemble the objects and remove them from the doors of the his house.
His family thought everything was just fun and took photos of the wide open holes where the do's knobs had once stood up. According to Schwartz, the function of a handle was to control the movement between two spaces, therefore, it acted as a control barrier between these two spaces and, if you remove it, you understand it.
What should you do? with the success of the man, though? Schwartz always wanted to understand how things worked and now he wants to dismantle another gate, the one that connects all the banks in the world. As current CTO and co-founder of Ripple, Schwartz's main mission is to interrupt SWIFT .
Disrupting SWIFT
SWIFT, in case you are familiar with the term, stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication and a Belgian cooperative founded in 1973. This institution can be considered the main intermediary of the system of international remittances because all international transactions pass through SWIFT.
It has more than 10,000 members who are financial institutions from almost all the countries of the world. If you wish to transfer any money internationally, you must use SWIFT. They make all parts of compliance and control the protection. It is said that SWIFT handles about 25 million messages a day and makes $ 6.74 billion in transfers worldwide.
However, as you may have already guessed, SWIFT is not exactly very efficient. Transactions can take days to be resolved and fees are high sometimes. Schwartz's mission is to understand SWIFT and remove it.
It will not only do this, however, since it would not make sense to replace the whole with something. Something will be Ripple. In fact, he has already done several tests with banks to find the best way to make international money remittances.
There are many obstacles on this path, however, since many people do not believe that Ripple is as decentralized as it claims to be, which can cause some problems for the company. The company is also facing competition from many other start-ups such as Stellar, which in practice was created with the same intent as Ripple.
Schwartz's main goal is to make money move as quickly as invisibly as information today uses an open decentralized network and blockchain technology.
The story of Schartz
The story of Schartz is similar to that of many of the people who work today in technology. He was a brilliant boy who lived in a suburb of Long Island and started learning to plan with his father. He was a bit of a stereotypical nerd: he did not really like sports, but he was good at chess.
He graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Houston in 1990 and obtained a patent for a computer network distributed 20 years earlier. Satoshi Nakamoto invented the blockchain. In the 90s he became interested in cryptography and founded a company with his father, but did not work as planned.
In 2001, he helped a company called WebMaster to design a cloud-based storage system. He has also been a consultant for the National Security Agency (NSA) and has acquired high-level cryptography knowledge. At the beginning of 2011 he was interested in Bitcoin, and although he was not a libertarian, he was worried about centralized control of money.
His main problem was that money regulators were not elected and that they were obscure and irresponsible. This made him interested in Bitcoin. At this time, he met Jed McCaleb, founder of the exchange Mt Gox and eDonkey 2000, a competitor of Napster. The two decided to build something similar to Bitcoin but that would use much less energy and could reduce transaction times.
With the help of Arthur Britto, Schwartz finished the XRP code in 2012. In 2014, McCaleb did not agree with the company and went on to found Stellar, which rivals Ripple to date.
The Potential Of Ripple
After McCaleb left the company, Schwartz developed two financial instruments that would be the main products of Ripple: xCurrent, a corporate software for banks to settle transactions and Xvia, a & # 39; payment interface for users to send payments globally with a high level of transparency.
The company has also launched a third product more recently: xRapid, which can be used to make it easier for banks to use XRP, as it frees capital and lowers costs by replacing local fiat currencies with XRP and then exchanging them for fiat again at the end of the transaction.
Banks soon saw the potential of products and began to be within it. Banks such as MUFG Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and Santander of Japan were among the first to use the technology.
However, the adoption of the token has been modest to date. While many companies have partnered with Ripple, such as Santander, for example, he started using Ripple's services, but he also used the services of other blockchain companies such as Hyperledger Fabric and Ion.
Other companies are more positive. Mercury CEO Alastair Constance said that SWIFT had a monopoly for too long and that it is lazy and inefficient and the company has started using xRapid.
SWIFT members are not too happy with Ripple's success, of course. Some of them have wondered if the solution is actually convenient for banks or if this is another excess of blockchain.
With the high whirring of cryptocurrencies, Ripple prices have risen from $ 0.006 USD in 2016 to $ 3.65 USD in January 2018
Strangely, Schwartz is not quoted as a co-founder of Ripple despite both the number two of the company and the chief architect of the structure.
A long mission to overcome SWIFT
It will certainly not be easy for Ripple to replace SWIFT because the network has 10,000 member banks and there are competitors like Stellar. Not only that, but the company is, ironically, accused of being too centralized and intruding.
We do not know yet if Ripple will be successful in his mission to overcome SWIFT or if the company simply be a convenient option. There is also the possibility that Ripple will fail. For this reason, the only way is to wait and see what happens while Schartz makes a Herculean effort to show the world that Ripple is worthy of being the new SWIFT.
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