Ripple CEO’s prediction: Banks to become custodians of cryptocurrencies in 2019

Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO, at the World Economic Forum spoke about blockchain and where it is headed in 2019. He also cleaned up some of the FUD revolving around Ripple and XRP. Most importantly, Garlinghosue spoke about his prediction for 2019 and how the banks would be an important part of it.

In addition, the CEO spoke about how the gaming industry on blockchain is under-hyped and that it will see recognition come 2019.

Brad Garlinghouse said that 2018 was a “bit of a hangover” for most of the players in the cryptocurrency and the blockchain industry due to huge changes.

He substantiated that the above was true as Bitmain underwent a change where they had to lay off several employees and how the regulators played a huge role in the fending off the bad players.

The CEO stated:

“There will be more maturity of projects of real use-cases solving real problems with more transparency as I described. I think we will get more transparency from U.S. regulators about these technologies.”

Garlinghouse continued that the U.S. was behind in terms of regulations when compared to the global regulators and said that 2019 would bring the much-needed clarifications surrounding cryptocurrencies and their technologies.

Furthermore, Garlinghouse said:

“… And I think we’ll start to see traditionally defined banks actually custody cryptocurrency as one prediction I’ve had for 2019”

The founder of Zynga, Eric Schiermeyer asked the panel a question about how 2019 might look for games on the blockchain and if gaming would be the mass-adoption moment for blockchain. Brad Garlinghouse answered:

“I think this is one area where blockchain use is underhyped… it is incredibly interesting in terms of which underlying blockchain is most efficient… I think there’s a couple being built upon the XRP Ledger and I think it’s gonna be very interesting space to watch in 2019.”

@ChristopherNotes commented:

“This is such a good watch. Very interesting debate between different views on blockchain. Is ripple decentralized?”