In a congressional hearing today over mobile payments and banking the unbanked, PayPal were among the companies present to discuss the changing payments landscape.

Congressman Tom Emmer discussed XRP and Ripple acknowledging their hard work that is revolutionising the way payments work from the ground up.

Mr Emmer showed a deep understanding of crypto and the coming changes to the global financial plumbing mentioning the inevitability of these changes.

There is whole environment of brilliant genius young people who are coming up with new ways to transfer value every single day & I worry that we are going to crush that entrepreneurial spirit I mean we have all heard of Bitcoin, Ethereum, are you familiar with XRP and the efforts of Ripple? Congressman Tom Emmer



The biggest take away for us was the general feeling that the kind of fundamental changes that Ripple tech will bring will be huge

Check out the hearing yourself from 45 minutes on the video below.



Also today the Federal reserve met with industry regulators and banking officials to discuss changes to the Volcker rule, created to prevent banking bad practice.

The Fed panel voted almost unanimously to make changes allowing banks to speculate recklessly, undoing the Volcker rule, put in place to prevent financial crises’ like 2008.

The purpose of the Volcker rule was to limit banks exposure to speculative trading and risky funds so they don’t again put public taxpayer funds at risk. I have previously supported exempting community banks from the Volcker rule and I do support today’s proposal to address the inadvertent treatment of foreign funds as banking entities. However I do have concerns that some of these changes will weaken core protections in the Volcker rule and enable banking firms to engage in high risk activities related to covered funds once again. Lael Brainard – Governor of the Federal Reserve

Only a couple of members voiced major concerns that banks may return to the malpractice that undoubtedly caused the devastating crash of 2008.

Check out the hearing below and Lael Brainard from 1:24 on the video below.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/live-broadcast.htm

Some in the cryptocurrency community feel the rejection of the Volcker Rule could pave the way for major speculative investment into the crypto space.

Check out this discussion surrounding the fact that the Volcker rule actually prevents banks from holding digital assets like XRP.

Consider that for a second and then read the story and this XRP Chat thread, rather compelling.

As always, this is not financial advice, do your own research and only invest what you can afford to lose, hopefully, we start to see some positive price action for XRP.