Ripple and XRP are great technology, but for banks and intermediaries, not for people

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  Santander praises Ripple's payments network to outperform the cross-border
  competition

Ana Botín, executive president of the Spanish financial giant
Banco Santander, has recently delivered a speech that praises Ripple technology and the
performance that brings to the table.

The speech was pronounced during the recent Santander
International banking conference in Madrid. In this speech – one that has touched
on different points related to the performance of Banco Santander – Ms. Botin
focused on the One Pay FX payments app of the company.

According to his address, this app (which runs above
Ripple's xCurrent blockchain solution has always worked very well
live in April of this year:

"YYou can make FX transfers in real time between the UK and Continental Europe. And you can really do Poland, Brazil and Chile – through Santander – at the same cost as Transferwise … And this is why we really need to think about what is real reciprocity. The devil is in the details and in the times. "

To make a comparison, TransferWise is a financial institution
which offers payment processing services in a conventional, non-cryptographic way
manner. While these institutions are able to provide immediate payments
within national borders, problems appear with the delivery of cross-border payments.

To perform a regular cross-border transaction, traditional financial services such as TransferWise take up to three days and require fairly high commissions. With One Pay FX and similar blockchain-based solutions, transaction times and fees are drastically reduced.

Build for banks and intermediaries, not for people

It should also be noted that Ripple is certainly not vaporware. The Ripple company is building a true technology that is used by real companies.

But traders should keep in mind that whatever Ripple is building, it is building it for banks and intermediaries, not for people, per se. This, in my opinion, puts it in a completely different category compared to Bitcoin and many other decentralized cryptocurrencies, whose goal is to eliminate intermediaries, decentralize money and empower the individual.

As a putative bank employee explained himself:

"Banks are adopting the Ripple communication protocol (RCP), to send other forms of payment to each other.The XRP currency plays a marginal role in this, since in it are collected some very low taxes for the use of 39; CPR, but far enough not to justify the current price.

Average Joe does not make any sense. If he tries to play smart and thinks that the banks will want to buy it because they will need it to pay for the processing of CPR payments, he can try to offer them his XPR. Bankers would probably get wet laughing about the fact that they had to pay $ 2 for this. Banks have all the XRP they need, and if they need more, Ripple can sell them more XRPs at a price that will keep CPR competitive. If CPR becomes too expensive for banks, it would stop using it.

But hope remains. The hope that someone, somewhere, will one day buy my XPR for $ 10 or more each. And that someone will always be there, at the end of the rainbow; on condition that you never go looking. "