Ripple CTO says consumer adoption still away; doesn’t want adoption to get ahead of technology

In a recent podcast by Internet History Podcast, David Schwartz, the Chief Technology Officer at Ripple spoke about the blockchain technology and consumer adoption in the future. Here, he stated an unpopular opinion that the cryptocurrency and blockchain space is still away from consumer adoption. In his opinion, this is because adoption should not overtake technological development.

In the interview, Schwartz pointed out that one of the surprising factors that he noticed in the payment sectors is the ancient technology involved. According to him:

“A bank might have a really nice website but if you go one or two layers down you’re in the 70s. And so we [Ripple] realized that if people were going to be able to use digital assets, they were going to be able to transact quickly, we were going to have a global payment system, it could not be built on technology that was that ancient.”

He continued to state Ripple’s role in improvising the current status of the payment systems wherein the company has a network called the RippleNet for banks and financial institutions. It is built on several modern principles and is capable of settling payments using digital assets. Furthermore, all the parameters of the payment are known is advance to deliver the intended results.

In the podcast, the CTO was asked about consumer adoption and how it would be useful for consumers. Here, Schwartz acknowledged that the technology still has a long way to go in that aspect, since it is still early for the technology to be accepted and adopted on the consumer level.

However, he added that consumer adoption at some point in the future will be relevant because if digital assets are to be used and taken to global markets, it will only make sense for Ripple’s technology to be coupled with it for faster, cheaper payments. Subsequently, he also mentioned:

“For the United States or parts of the world that have stable native currencies… I’m perfectly happy using dollars, I know that there’s some inflation going on but it works fine. I have to pay my bills in dollars, I get my salary in dollars so it makes sense for me.”

Switching to the global fiat scene, the tech expert implied that the parts of the world with unstable currencies might be interested in having a choice at hand in whether to use fiat or digital assets. Here, Schwartz talked about adoption racing technological development and stated:

“I don’t want the adoption to get ahead of the technology. It took a long time for the internet to get to the point where it was suitable for anybody to use it and you didn’t have to really understand the technology in great detail in order to be able to get it to work.”

Lastly, the Ripple official shared that many companies are on the task of pulling in retail adoption for cryptocurrencies. Although, according to Schwartz, it will take a while before adoption sees success.