XRP/USD: Ripple is in good shape to replace Swift - Chris Larsen

Ripple’s XRP is in good shape to replace Swift as an international payment network, according to the Ripple founder Chris Larsen. Speaking in the interview on the Block Stars podcast, he said that banks were unlikely to use Bitcoin’s proof-of-work system for validating transactions. To prove the point, he underlined that banks may be wary of the risks of 51% attack, in which a miner or a group of miners can gain control over more than 50% of the network hash rate and manipulate the entries in the ledger.

The miners can rewrite history. So that’s why I think you probably won’t see proof-of-work models be the guts of the global financial system to take the place of Swift and correspondent banking, for example. Whereas I think XRP Ledger, I think is already proving to be, can be that replacement to that existing inefficient system.

According to Crypto51, which tracks the theoretical cost of 51% attacks on blockchain networks, it would currently cost $334,703 an hour to gather enough computing power to take over the Bitcoin ledger.

Thus, according to Crypto51 service that tracks the risks and costs of 51% attacks on various blockchains, it will cost the attacker cost $334,703 an hour to take over Bitcoin ledger. Meanwhile, XRP is not mined, thus it is not vulnerable to this type of risk. Now Ripple controls a list of validators that process transactions, but the company plans to remove its control and make the ledger less centralized.

Larsen added that Swift remains its primary target.

I think we started out [as] kind of a consumer-based company. We quickly saw, though, that to really have maximum impact, being an enterprise company that worked with the existing financial players and new challengers to the financial system was going to be much more successful. Because these were organizations that already had hundreds of millions of customers and had this fundamental problem.

XRP/USD: technical picture

XRP/USD has settled above $0.2000, however, the further recovery is limited by $0.2030, which is 38.2% Fibo retracement for the downside move from February 2020 high. A sustainable move above this area is needed for the upside to gain traction with the next focus on $0.2070 (1-hour SMA200) and psychological $0.2100.

On the downside, a move below $0.2000 will worsen the short-term technical picture and push XRP back inside the range $0.1900-$0.2000 that limited the price movements during the previous week.

XRP/USD 1-hour chart