In an exclusive interview for the “Gregarious Mammal” Podcast, Stefan Thomas, the current CTO of Ripple, had the opportunity to chat with Chris Ward about his views on the advances in decentralization and payment processing, as well as the philosophy that has led Ripple to become one of the most successful companies in the world of DLTs.

It is no secret to anyone that Ripple is a company that has managed to gain the trust of several key players in the world of finance, and despite having a controversial image in the world of cryptocurrencies, no one doubts the seriousness and solidity that the company projects in the business world.

During the interview, Stefan Thomas confirmed that American Express, one of the leading companies in the financial services industry, has agreed to use Ripple’s platform as a means of processing the vast amount of transactions they handle.

Also, Mr. Thomas confirmed that Western Union is also interested in adopting Ripple’s platform, which is a sign of the strength and credibility of Ripple, as well as the convenience of the services it provides through blockchain technologies.

Approximately at minute 4 of the interview, while speaking about the benefits of the products offered by Ripple, Mr. Thomas confirmed American Express may be already testing Ripple’s platform:

“Some of the companies that have agreed to use xCurrent and xRapid are companies like American Express and Western Union, so there are big companies that are testing this.”

“A Little Bit of Blokchain”

Ripple’s growth within the financial sector has brought big capitals closer to the world of blockchain technologies, but its vision of centralization and support for traditional financial systems has generated some rejection among the most purist in the crypto community.

However, this doesn’t seem to bother Ripple’s team. Mr. Thomas comments:

“Ripple has always been a payments company first, and blockchain has always been in our DNA, but we were never dogmatic about what we acknowledge to apply … there’s a little bit of blockchain in all of our different products.”

He commented that the discussion about the characteristics of XRP ledger does not bother him. He mentioned that according to his opinion, XRP is more decentralized than Bitcoin due to the high centralization of hashing power by four mining pools.

For Stefan Thomas, much of the criticism comes from users, and people with high investments in Bitcoin and other altcoins who see Ripple as a competitor of different characteristics tend to discredit him. Thomas descries this kind of thinking as “Hey, you’re competing with us, we’re gonna make you sound not so good.”

Ripple’s XRP currently ranks third in the global market cap with $13.107.265.851 and a price per token of $0,332905