Stefan Thomas, chief technology officer of Ripple Labs, wants to build something he calls the "internet of value". "By value we're talking about money but were also talking about stocks and bonds... intellectual property... anything you can think of that might have value," he tells the audience at WIRED Money.
When the web was first created, he says. "You were asking servers to do stuff on your behalf". The server has to do that thing you asked of it, but the server won't do it for free At the time they imagined in the future there would be an extension into http that would facilitate these payments -- make them smooth.. "We believe this point in the future has finally come," says Thomas.
Obviously there are already payments that take place on the web, but they are siloed. "There are some connections between the systems but there is no universal standard," says Thomas. "Market makers can actually link different systems together and create connections that create a flat and completely connected payments world."
This is where Ripple Labs comes in. What Thomas and his colleagues are trying to do is create a "liquidity marketplace" -- the ideal environment in which to build an internet of value. If you compared Ripple Labs with Uber -- the marketplace for cars -- what you would see is that the company is "a marketplace for whoever has the funds".
The question for those entering this space, says Thomas, is whether or not you work with the banks. "We really need to work with the banks very closely because that is where the lowest rate of funds is." Ripple can lower those costs even further. "I get more excited the lower the fee gets," he says, which is in direct contrast to everyone else. People start to get less and less excited if the price sinks below the cost of sending a letter, because they are already paying so little by that point anyway.
Thomas believes such people are "completely missing the point". "No-one would look at the web that way," he says. "It's not the fact that you can lower people costs, but you can introduce new business models." Using such technology, he believes, is to enable these business models to flourish on a global scale corresponds to a much greater increase in volume of payments.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
