【Bob語録#8】XRPの普及がもたらす地政学的影響について

I wonder if you could speak to the geopolitical ramifications of XRP adoption. That is, has Ripple considered this aspect beyond regulation? I know this is a touchy subject and can go in many speculative directions, but it would be interesting to hear any insight at all that you might have.

VanGogh

I’m not sure I’m qualified to use fancy words like “geopolitical” correctly. 🙂 But there are huge improvements coming to the structure of banking.

So “geopolitically” speaking, one of the weirdest things about banking is how the international relationships are structured. This is true especially among the smaller countries. Take a random made up example. Say Alice lives in Barbados and want to do a business transaction with Bob in Saint Lucia. It is just a standard two party business deal for services rendered. But Alice uses BBD and Bob uses XCD. So how do their banks settle that transaction?

Well it turns out in many cases they use USD. That sentence sounds pretty sensible not earth shaking to anyone… But how does that really work? Well it turns out that important banks in Barbados keep “correspondent” accounts with a large US bank. Let’s say Citi in this case. And some large bank in Sant Lucia also keeps a correspondent account with a US bank. Let’s say BofA in that case. The settlement actually happens by the Barbados bank telling Citi to wire money through the FedWire system to the St Lucia’s account at BofA. These requests are transmitted via SWIFT.

But the crazy thing is that US law says that both Citi and BofA need to screen the transaction between Alice and Bob for compliance with US laws! And if a bad transaction slips through, both Citi and BofA can be fined huge amounts. So in effect, whether Alice in Barbados can do business with Bob in St Lucia becomes dependent on whether or not US banks want to allow it. Even though the transaction doesn’t involve US jurisdiction at all!

The side effect of the US bank’s risk in these transactions is that they’ve started closing the correspondent banking accounts for entire countries. The risk is just seen as too high for the reward (fees) that they can charge. This is called in banking jargon, “the de-risking problem”.

A bridge currency like XRP changes that dynamic dramatically. Transaction that don’t involve the US (or other third countries) don’t have to travel through their systems to settle. That allows people to stop jumping through third party regulatory hoops and just get one with doing business.（一部抜粋）

BobWay