David Schwartz: The Man Behind Ripple

The co-creator of the 3^rd most valuable and well-traded cryptocurrency, David Schwartz, is known as a “Gandalfesque” wizard of Ripple (XRP).

As Ripple’s chief technology officer, Schwartz wants to modernize and facilitate global money transfers, making them fast and safe.

In this ambitious challenge, Schwartz will disrupt SWIFT, which is the number one middleman in the international banking world. Though the company handles 25 million bank transfer messages every day and helps to perform $6.74 trillion worth of transactions, SWIFT’s network can’t be called efficient enough.

In the era of blockchain technologies, when Ethereum and Bitcoin can exchange millions in seconds, the majority of international bank transfers still take not less than 3 days and require additional fees. Sounds a bit odd and obsolete, don’t you agree?

Well, Ripple, powered by David Schwartz’s technological genius, is on a mission to lead international money transfers into a happy (and much faster) future. Ripple has introduced and attracted hundreds of the largest global financial institutions to test its new instrument, designed to change the whole procedure of traditional money transfers.

David Schwartz mentions, “We want to create a payment network like SWIFT. But one where the settlement, the actual movement of money, the actual plumbing underneath the surface, would be a decentralized, open network. The endgame is just money moving invisibly, as easily as information.”

Who is David Schwartz?

Quick facts about the guy behind the crypto:

• A prototypical high school nerd, David always preferred chess over sports.
• In the 1990s he graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in electrical engineering.
• The same years he was awarded his first patent for a distributed computer network that he designed (20 years before the Bitcoin blockchain was invented).
• In 2001, David started working at WebMaster, where he designed a cloud-based storage system.
• Schwartz developed his knowledge of cryptography and consulted for the NSA (National Security Agency).
• David runs a widely-read blog under the nickname JoelKatz (the same as his twitter handle @JoelKatz with 100,000 followers).
• In 2011 Schwartz, looking for something new, joined the Bitcoin community. Together with the founder of Mt Gox bitcoin exchange Jed McCaleb, they shared the idea to create the NewCoin – a financial infrastructure that would consume less energy and reduce transaction time.
• In 2012 Ripple was born.
• In 2015 Ripple made the RippleNet Committee, consisting of 4 major banks that invested in Ripple’s payment technology.
• With the bubbling excitement around cryptocurrencies in 2016-2017, by January 2018 XRP you could trade Ripple at $3.65 instead of $0.006 a year before. Ironically, David Schwartz is not officially listed as a co-founder of Ripple, despite being its major architect.

Today, Ripple has launched 3 products, including xCurrent, xVia and the latest one – xRapid. The product helps international banks to overcome their long-time problem, as they have to maintain multiple accounts in local currencies around the globe to perform money transfers. xRapid substitutes local currencies with XRP, which helps to lower the transactional costs and free up the capital involved. Ripple is aiming to make XRP the number one decentralized reserve currency, used by international banks.

The competition made SWIFT nervous and caused immediate action. They launched a Global Payment Innovation Initiative (GPI), as a non-blockchain alternative to perform payments in real-time.

Only time will tell, who will win this competition or, maybe, find the way to coexist successfully, gaining their own part of the market. Let’s wait a bit and see, whether David Schwartz, Ripple’s soul, will achieve his ambitious goal.

Important: If you trade CFDs on cryptocurrencies, including Ripple, please, bear in mind that many retail investors lose money when trading. You should consider whether you can afford to take the risk.

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