During the recent Pomp Podcast #325 with Michael Arrington, Anthony Pompliano talked a bit about XRP and Ripple.
Arrington is the founder of Arrington XRP Capital, as well as the founder and former co-director of TechCrunch.
During the conversation, Pompliano had the opportunity to present his opinion on Ripple and XRP.
It should be noted that Ripple is the company, while XRP is the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger blockchain, created by Ripple.
The co-founder of Morgan Creek Digital reported that he considers Ripple as an interesting company, but he doesn’t understand why there are people investing in XRP.
In fact, he said that Ripple’s success may not necessarily increase the value of XRP.
At one point he stated explicitly:
“I think that XRP as part of the Ripple product, meaning they use it inside the product, I understand why they do that. I see the advantages inside the Ripple ecosystem. What I don’t understand, and I think where I choose to not engage on the XRP side, is I don’t understand why people are buying it, speculating on future price movements.
To me, if Ripple is successful, that doesn’t mean XRP has to be successful…
If you separate XRP and Ripple, Ripple as a software company that wants to build better software for banks, [it is a] no-brainer, makes sense, venture capital bet. I’m jealous I didn’t invest in Ripple in the seed round”.
In other words, he points out that XRP is not a means to invest in Ripple, because it is only the utility token of the platform, which does not reflect the value of the company.
Instead, it is the company’s capital that, evidently, reflects the value of the company, and that would be a valid investment.
In fact, the Ripple company is working on a far-reaching project to try to revolutionize the way financial institutions exchange or send value to each other, and in this case, XRP is only one of the technologies used.
In addition, the company itself sells many of the XRP tokens it still holds in its portfolio to finance its development, and this could go on for years to come.
It is not by chance, therefore, that the value of XRP on the market is still far from its historical highs.
The highest point was reached at the beginning of January 2018, in the middle of a speculative bubble, when its price went as high as $3.5, while it is now struggling to exceed $0.2. Since then it has lost almost 95% of its value, and even if compared to the average price in the second half of 2017, just under $0.3, it is still lower.
In other words, the real investment in Ripple is in its capital, not in the XRP cryptocurrency.
