Takatoshi Shibayama: 0:00

Hey, hey, hey, welcome to this week's episode of Blockhead's Blockcast. I'm your host, Takatoshi Shibayama. I'm also the head of APAC for Ledger. I aim to uncover the creative, intelligent, and radical minds who are shaping the crypto industry today. I'm as crypto curious as anybody that's tuning into this show. We're doing this together, guys. Let's go. Hello, everyone. Today, we're here at the APEX 2025. With me, we have Mr. Eric Van Mittenberg, the SVP of Strategic initiatives at Ripple. Thank you for being on our show.

Eric van Miltenburg: 0:38

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 0:39

You mentioned this is your second time for doing the APEX or Ripple conference in Singapore, am I right?

Eric van Miltenburg: 0:47

Yes. I mean, this is the first time we've had APEX, which is the conference focused on the XRPL developer community here in Singapore. But yes, we back in 2019 had one of our other big events, which is called Swell, which brings really Ripple's commercial customers together. And that gathering was here in Singapore, which is memorable for many reasons.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 1:06

And what do you look to achieve for this Apex 2025? And then what is like a desired outcome for you?

Eric van Miltenburg: 1:12

Yeah, I mean, so this is an annual convening of really the community that's involved with the XRP Ledger. And historically, it really was focused on developers, those that have projects and ideas and see the value, the functionality of the XRP Ledger and are coming to learn more, coming to learn more about the Ledger, how it's being advanced, how the features and functionalities will evolve, coming to hear about other projects that are on the Ledger, sharing best practices and ideas, and frankly, just building a network in the community.

Eric van Miltenburg: 1:44

So this has been going on now for several years. We change locations from year to year. And this year, I think there's so much positive interesting news to talk about i mean in general in the blockchain space and then specifically around the xrp ledger more projects as has always been the case with ripple and again ripple and the xrp ledger are separate they're different entities but ripple's always had a strong focus on addressing real-world problems.

Eric van Miltenburg: 2:13

For Ripple, the work we do around Web3 and crypto, it's really all about driving real value. It's not about speculation or trying to watch the price of a particular asset go up. It's how do we apply this technology and make some of the challenges and problems around us less problematic, specifically around financial use cases as a company. So anyway, there's a lot of exciting things going on.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 2:34

Yeah, I'm really, really looking forward to participating in your event today and tomorrow and learn more about what Ripple is doing. But through this conversation, I'd really love to learn more about Ripple's achievements so far, the M&A activities that you guys have been doing and maybe your views on the crypto industry, how it's going to look like in the next few years. But let's take a step back a little bit. And I've been looking at your LinkedIn profile and I'm just seeing so many, I mean, obviously you have a very decorated career in the internet space. I mean, I'm looking at all these names that you work for, reminds me back when I was still in school, you know, kind of having, you know, exposure to these companies and, you know, maybe some of them don't exist anymore. But how did you get into this world of technology? And I'd love to learn how that journey took you into crypto.

Eric van Miltenburg: 3:25

Sure. It's a long and winding road. I won't bore you with every stop along the way. But many, many years ago, I was a consultant. And I think as many consultants, not all, but many after a while, I want to get out there and do it versus just help other people doing it. And at the time I was living in San Francisco and Silicon Valley was right down the road. I'm like, this technology thing's probably something I should look into. And I'll really date myself. It was the mid nineties. And this thing called the internet was sort of coming into flavor. And I'm like, that sounds like something that I want to learn more about.

Eric van Miltenburg: 3:56

And anyway, I had my first job working for a dial-up internet service provider. Backward dial-up was all you And that really was the start. And it just, the energy, the innovation, the potential to make a difference was fantastic. And, you know, The late 90s and the internet was full of a lot of bubble stories that popped, but also it set the foundation for some amazingly impactful products and services that we all use every day that we don't even think about anymore. So anyway, that was the beginning of the journey. I'm a business person, not an engineer, so it's always been on the business side. And I've worked for little person startups. I've worked for large public companies that are global.

Eric van Miltenburg: 4:37

Fast forward to 2016 We got a phone call, and that was from Brad Garlinghouse, who's our CEO. At the time, he wasn't Ripple's COO. And Brad is somebody I've worked with in past lives. And Brad said, Eric, you've got to come work for Ripple. Given that I knew Brad, I was following the story a little bit. I said, Brad, I'm not in payments. I knew that Ripple at the time was focused on payments. And I know a little bit about Bitcoin and blockchain. He said, you're going to love it. And knowing Brad, knowing the types of projects he gets involved with and the types of people he surrounds him with. So, but I took a really serious look. And really what struck me is given my experience in the early days of the internet, it was one of the most exciting periods of my career. Just the needing to figure things out, being involved with a technology you knew was going to be really impactful, but you didn't know exactly how. And just getting the, you know, roll up your sleeves and work on that was exciting.

Eric van Miltenburg: 5:28

And, you know, my impression was, was that blockchain and crypto was gonna be similar. A really long-term impactful technology that most people end up using and maybe not even know they're using it and a chance to get in early and have a role in trying to figure out which direction it will take and how it would be significant. So that was the impetus. And it's been a wild ride over the last eight years. But anyway, I'll stop there. But that's kind of how I went from being more of an internet tech business guy into the Web3 space.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 5:58

And do you find the start of the internet boom quite similar to how blockchain and crypto started as well. Do you see similarities?

Eric van Miltenburg: 6:08

There's definitely similarities, but it's not identical. There's definitely these waves of hype people chasing things that don't make sense. I mean, late 90s, you know, in the bubble time, there were all sorts of things. And all these things that went away. But you also had Google and other very substantial companies that have huge impacts on our lives globally right now. And so, you know, I've seen similar things. Some of the crazy NFT rug pull types of things that happened early on. Tons of money flowing into this, only that it just kind of goes to zero. And, you know, I think... People sometimes get overexcited by the hype, and that happened in the internet phase. I think some of that has happened in the crypto phase. But again, one of the reasons why I was attracted to Ripple and why I'm still super bullish and enthusiastic and excited to be at Ripple is that it gets back to this, how do you use this technology to address real problems, problems that we all face? And there's a whole portfolio of those. But yes, a long answer to a simple question. I see a lot of similarities, and that's what makes it exciting.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 7:10

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the main difference I actually do see is that the internet didn't carry value in a way that blockchain does, right? So crypto in general has value.

Eric van Miltenburg: 7:23

I agree. I agree. It's a different type of value. I mean, the internet, we're all learning this in some good ways and some bad. I mean, here's data. Data is value. And data can be used in different ways. And so the impact, the import, the... implications, I guess, are significant both ways. But yes, when you're talking about hard cash or digital cash, and it's a very regulated space, and there's large institutions that have been doing this for literally centuries that sort of have this entrenched... place both physically and almost psychologically, it carries a different weight.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 7:57

For sure. I think that that's kind of how the speculative part really comes in, unfortunately, because, you know, there is a digital token associated to it and then, you know, you create a bunch of tokens based on, you know, whatever utility or something that you could come up with, which is not really why I came into this industry as well. And, you know, I'm kind of a little bit more in line with you. I think that blockchain can solve real world problems. And I think you mentioned that you joined Ripple, you know, initially it was about payments. How did that journey look? And then how is it kind of turning into a different beast now?

Eric van Miltenburg: 8:30

Yeah, it has been an evolution. But the thing to call out, a mission or a vision, I should say, when I joined the company eight and a half years ago, hasn't changed at all. And it predates my joining the company. It's really, we're trying to enable the internet of value. We believe in the ability that value should be moving around the world as efficiently as data moves around the internet. And historically it hasn't. And we think blockchain is a lever, if you will, that we can pull and address that. Back even before I joined, there was a discussion of, okay, so if you believe in that, Where do you start? It's sort of this wide field. There's so many different applications.

Eric van Miltenburg: 9:06

And our analysis led us to say that cross-border payments was really our flagship. It was a great insertion point so we can prove the value and address some of the inefficiencies that sort of exist in the legacy payment system. And we've done a great job with that over the last nine years or so. Hundreds of customers around the world, we've built out a payments network that addresses 90% of the FX-traded. We've processed $70 billion worth of transactions. So we gained a lot of momentum. And I think we've established ourselves as a credible, serious player to help bridge the gap between more of a TradFi world and a DeFi world as it relates to payments.

Eric van Miltenburg: 9:45

But in doing that, we started, in conversations with customers, seeing other needs and other opportunities. idea of on-ramps and off-ramps between fiat currency and digital currency. And so we started building up liquidity capabilities. You don't have to think about it too long to say, well, if the financial institutions are going to start to hold digital assets, how do they hold them? So custody is important. We went and acquired a company about two years ago called Medeco out of Switzerland that has an enterprise-grade custody solution that now is part of the Ripple portfolio. Again, the ability to move easily out of currencies stablecoins import.

Eric van Miltenburg: 10:23

We launched Ripple USD, RLUSD back in December as a stablecoin offering, largely because our customers were using stablecoins and that payments flow as a bridge currency between two fiat currencies. And they were asking, why don't you guys have a stablecoin? I'd rather just work with you on the payments and the stablecoins instead of having to go and source that from other ways. And then most recently, we made an acquisition of a company called Hidden Road that's a prime broker that, again, straddles the world between digital and traditional finance. So what we're really doing is we're creating a portfolio of building blocks, thinking of them as enterprise blockchain piece parts that we work with, with our customers who are mostly, not entirely, but currently mostly financial institutions, to help them, almost as a partner as opposed to a vendor, unlock the full potential potential of blockchain technology.

Eric van Miltenburg: 11:22

And you know you could imagine that we'll want to add other pieces some of those will be done organically some of those will do you know through acquisition and fold them into our portfolio but the point is that you know we want to kind of become and it's a little bit of an overused term but that one-stop shop that a financial institution can say Ripple's trusted they're serious they're about real-world solutions. They're compliant. We work, we have 60 licenses around the world, ranging from MTLs in the U.S. to the major payments institution – Is that MPI? I always get the acronym in my head mixed up – license here in Singapore. And so we try to not only represent ourselves, but act as a responsible player that is worthy of being partners to these institutions.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 12:06

Yeah. From the outside, I always thought of Ripple as a payment company. And I thought we were going to kind of build more blocks on top of that. But it was quite, well, Metaco acquisition wasn't very surprising to me because obviously custody is a base layer for everything. But the acquisition of Hidden Road was quite surprising because I didn't think it was kind of natural to go into payments. It was more like, okay, is Ripple trying to become more like an investment bank? Because that's what investment banks have. They have a prime brokerage business. Obviously, they'll have more of a markets business. Maybe you can build that out with RWAs going forward.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 12:42

But it's great for Hidden Road. because I knew that they needed access to a big balance sheet to grow their business. And I think it's a really good mariage of the two businesses. But at the same time for Ripple, going into crypto prime brokers is a very big leap from payments. It's more of a retail banking type of business to like a investment banking business. So I thought that was kind of quite a leap. But are there other stacks or financial business stacks that you're looking going forward that would complement these businesses?

Eric van Miltenburg: 13:13

There's something I can comment on specifically right now. To your point, I totally get it. I think it's a fair assessment. That's certainly interesting, Ripple going and buying Hidden Road. But at the surface, it really makes quite a bit of sense. One, from Hidden Road's perspective, you're right. They have so much demand from players ranging from very known private equity hedge funds that want to do more with them, but like your balance sheet, can't do as much as they want. That makes tons of sense. You think about RLUSD and the ability to think of RLUSD as being collateral that they need instead of holding fiat or instead of holding another stable coin.

Eric van Miltenburg: 13:53

I mean, the volumes that Hidden Road deals in are enormous and will be even greater with kind of the backing of Ripple. And then even as you look at the broad portfolio, the hundreds of customers that Hinro has, they're all either holding or considering holding digital assets, so custody. could be an obviously upsell. So there's a lot of cross-pollination and cross-fertilization. But to get you a question about are there other components, other building blocks, yes. The way we've approached it, certainly we have a point of view, we have a vision, if you will, but almost everything I've talked about and everything we've added has really been customer-informed, customer-driven. The whole, even of all the payments product, where before we had a product that required our customers to go and form relationships with centralized exchanges, both on the sending market and on the receiving market.

Eric van Miltenburg: 14:44

And since then, you know, listening to our customers are like, that's really a pain. We'd love for Ripple really to take that full end-to-end solution. So we've gone out, we've gone through a lot of hard work and effort to acquire licenses, Ripple Wired, that allow us to be a money transmitter and a digital money transmitter. So I think that the next pieces as we build out this portfolio, we'll definitely be informed by our customer interactions. Right.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 15:09

Yeah. I mean, for me, like the obvious one, I thought it would have been like a brokerage business, right? So not a crypto prime brokerage business, but more of like a retail brokerage business potentially. Yeah.

Eric van Miltenburg: 15:19

We've had this conversation internally probably ever since I've started. Where is our sweet spot in terms of target customers? And we've always, without fail, been a B2B company. We're an enterprise company. We don't do retail. Have we thought about getting into kind of becoming a centralized exchange? Yes, but The answer is that's not really our business. We think our value proposition and what we can do on our own or how we can leverage something like the XRP Ledger is really well suited for that enterprise customer.

Eric van Miltenburg: 15:46

So never say never. Who knows how the markets evolve and whatnot. But yeah, our inclination is to stay on the track we've already kind of carved out and has been successful for us. And that's to be more of a B2B partner as opposed to go straight to retail. Now, our customers in turn have retail customers. So the benefit of what Ripple does is felt down at the retail level. But in terms of our direct interactions, we've kept it to be enterprise level.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 16:13

I feel like Ripple has been building its business very differently from other token foundations that are out there, especially in a similar generation that Ripple was built out. They became more of a development or builders foundation as opposed to like a business centric foundation. But also they have large balance sheets. They probably use it to grant projects for growing their ecosystem. How do you think that that going forward in the future. I mean, there's tons of foundations being built out almost every day. What do you think is the good model for these token foundations to build their businesses? Because it's, you know, I think Ripple really went down a different path compared to the others.

Eric van Miltenburg: 16:56

Yeah, well, a couple of things, and I'm going to be a little bit annoying just from a semantics perspective. So yeah, I wouldn't think of Ripple as a token foundation. So the chronology is the XRP ledger was created 13-ish years ago. And its founders created a ledger, created this token that wrote on top of the XRP ledger called XRP. They minted 100 units. There's no more that will be created. They kept a chunk of it. And then a new company was created and they gifted the tokens to Ripple. There's a lot of understandable confusion thinking that these are one and the same.

Eric van Miltenburg: 17:29

The XRP ledger is a public permissionless decentralized blockchain ledger. Ripple runs 2% of the validators on the ledger right now. Any amendments made to that ledger need to be voted on by the XRP community. It's not dictated by Ripple. So you're right. It is different in that Ripple from its foundation, which was separate from the XRP ledger, was a for-profit business looking to create products that serve customers and generate revenue and ultimately grow and all those things. So we still, to be clear... are big proponents and champions of the XRP ledger. I mean, that's why we're here. I mean, Apex is about the XRP ledger and the innovation and building on that ledger. We want to support that. Ripple is focused only on a small subset of types of innovations. It's around tokenization of real world assets and about payments use cases. It's very financial focused, enterprise grade, that there's so many other things that can happen on the XRP ledger.

Eric van Miltenburg: 18:27

And we know that the more projects, the more development on the ledger, the more liquidity, the more trust and utility, and that's good for the whole community. So we are and will continue to be a big supporter. We actually have a group within Ripple called Ripple X, you might know of, and Ripple X is the group that doesn't work on payments. They don't work on custody per se. They're working on, there's some core ledger development activity, but then it's also how do we support members of the broader XRPL community? Sometimes that's in the form of grants. Other times it's just in training and learning.

Eric van Miltenburg: 18:59

And now there are other independent foundations separate from Ripple, there's the XRP Ledger Foundation. There's another foundation, XRPL Commons, that's based in Paris. They're participating today. Ripple's participating today. I'm not really answering your question, which is what would I... recommend others, but I am not foolish enough to think that I know the answer to that. I do think that there's been a lot of lessons learned, I think, over the last decade in terms of what works and what doesn't. So I am sounding, I have a broken record about a real world utility and looking for projects that are more than just trying to capture the fat of the day. and have staying power that is gonna turn into a real business. It's kind of obvious, but it's kind of a filter through which we put.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 19:43

Yeah, I feel like in the crypto industry, a lot of people who are founders are generally from tech. So they think, you know, if you build it, they will come. And, you know, it's always been like tech first, before finding a problem to solve. And going forward, I think that needs to be on the forefront of any projects that are being built out because there's been so much capital destruction in the crypto space that could have been used to solve real world problems as opposed to just hyping it up and ripping that away from my retail investors. such a waste of capital that I think today would have looked much different if it weren't for that, for all that to happen. You've seen the kind of rise of the internet. I'm just going back to that. And you're in the crypto space now. What do you think from that kind of trajectory, how do you think the crypto industry would look like in the next few years from now?

Eric van Miltenburg: 20:33

Yeah, magic ball time, I should say. Certainly, if you just look at the last nine months, less than a year, the momentum, especially if you're in the US, has shifted dramatically. And I think Some of that is because you're starting to see some of these more pragmatic solutions take shape. But the regulatory sort of environment has turned more into tailwinds than headwinds. Certainly, that's true for Ripple. And I think if you talk to most US-based Web3 country companies, they'd say the same. Regulatory clarity, super important. We say it all the time. We've been saying it for years and years and years. People say, oh, you guys don't want to be regulated. We do. We want clarity. Obviously, we want to be sensible clarity. We want regulators to strike a balance between obviously protecting businesses and individuals while also spurring innovation. You can't be too far on either end of that on that spectrum.

Eric van Miltenburg: 21:20

So I think that's a positive sign. I think that has led to larger institutions, which heretofore were like, can't touch crypto, not going to even talk about it. I mean, you just look at what's happening in terms of the Biddle Fund, BlackRock, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And almost every bank now is talking about either having a digital exchange or tokenizing something or figuring out how they're going to integrate that. So I think those all set the stage to put this space into a new, very positive trajectory. I think, frankly, the incredible rise in embrace of stable coins globally, the US especially, is really telling. And people can relate to that. They understand it. They see the benefits of how quickly you can move things, how inexpensively, how 24-7, the wait for bank hours and whatnot, something we've been working on internally with our payments product, both with Stablecoins and with XRP as a bridge asset. But I think all of these things are starting to demystify this a little bit.

Eric van Miltenburg: 22:21

Again, I can't help but go back to the internet days in the mid to early 90s. This is a mysterious, dark place where the only thing that happened on the internet, according to people, was selling drugs, guns, porn. That's all it was good for, and we should just ban it. It's horrible. back to the parallels, I think there's still a perception by folks who don't know a lot about it and it's understandable because there's some bad stuff. But that's what it's about. I think as academics embrace it, that's part of this program we have with University Blockchain Research Initiative or UBRI, that starts to demystify as institutions they're familiar with, financial institutions start to use it. They're like, okay, I guess I should learn more about it. And I think it's a progression and We're getting to an inflection point. I don't know if that's a year, two years, or three years.

Eric van Miltenburg: 23:10

I don't think it's in 10 years, where all of a sudden it's not going to be this mysterious, scary thing, but a utility that helps make things that we deal with, especially around financial issues, better and more efficient. I mean, I'm hoping for the day, and again, I can't put a date on it, that just like I don't think we all care about what our IP address is or really understand what TCP IP is and exactly how the protocols for email work. We just send information and files around the world in a second for free. People don't go around saying anymore, what's your internet strategy? Back in the late 90s or early 2000s, do you have an internet strategy? You should have an internet strategy. The same thing is going to happen. People are now saying, what's your crypto strategy? Do you have a blockchain, Web3 strategy? I think at some point, that's just going to be integrated into the fabric of building a business, especially one that deals with financial issues.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 24:06

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I've already seen in this region, too, there's a lot of commodities companies that are not associated with crypto or anything using crypto or US dollar stablecoins for immediate payments. And that's kind of a use case that I think is going to be more natural for other industries that are coming. I mean, obviously, the capital efficiency of blockchain is second to none. And I think that payment is an area that crypto has already planted its flag. I think potentially, if we see public securities transacted on blockchain, you don't have to wait for T+2 settlements, T +1 settlements, the capital efficiency would be much better going forward. So, you know, I think what we need to find is like what other areas, because we've already seen what actually works, the table coin works, the RWA stuff kind of works. What other areas do you think blockchain will be more useful in your view? Maybe where Ripple might be heading towards as well.

Eric van Miltenburg: 25:02

Yeah, it's interesting what you're saying before just about efficient use of capital and actually it triggered something of a right before coming into our conversation that our CEO and President Brad and Monica were on stage and they were talking about Brad joining and Ripple early on, Monica referred to it as a hammer looking for a nail, like could do anything with it, right? And Brad, and I've worked with Brad in the past, he's very good at focusing people.

Eric van Miltenburg: 25:25

Like, no, we need a target. There's going to be a lot of noise. We've got to separate the wheat from the chaff. We've got to focus on this thing. And yes, there could be other things, but if we don't focus, we're We're going to spare ourselves too thin and we're not going to succeed. And that's when we chose payments. And again, more B2B payments, cross-border payments. So just kind of coming in your last point of, well, we will expand the portfolio of building blocks, as I said earlier, never say never, but it isn't our near-term aspiration to go off into things that are too far afield. Having the common thread of B2B financial use case is really core.

Eric van Miltenburg: 25:59

Now, what's next? I mean, there's a lot of things. You talk about tokenization of real world assets. I mean, the figures are estimating there's $19 trillion of assets will be tokenized by 2030. I might have those stats wrong, but it's just It's astronomical. And within that, the asset classes, there's opportunities probably in trade finance, and there's opportunities in insurance, real estate, a lot of different sectors. Will Ripple get into all of those? No. Will we help power partner companies that do? Probably. Or will we work with financial institutions that service those companies? Yeah, absolutely. Even though I mentioned we'll stay focused, even that relatively small swath that we're focusing on, there's a lot to think about, and that's where we spend most of our time.

Eric van Miltenburg: 26:43

I don't know if I can give an intelligent answer in terms of what's the next other thing, but there are, and I think that's what makes this conference we're sitting in, APEX, interesting, because while Ripple is maintaining a real tight focus on what it feels it's particularly well suited to do, there's so many other creative entrepreneurs developers, builders sitting in the audience that just have other ideas. And it's kind of the benefit. We get the benefit of having our focus, but then also having interaction and visibility into a community that's leveraging a common tool, that being the XRP Ledger, in a way that just thinks differently than we do. And that's great. That creates a more robust, resilient ecosystem in general.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 27:22

I agree. We're kind of towards the end of the episode now, but are there any parting messages or any things that you like to share on top of what you shared with us today?

Eric van Miltenburg: 27:31

No, it's just an exciting time to be in this space. You know, opportunity is significant. We got to, I think as an industry, we have to stay focused and there's been some trials and errors as an industry, as Ripple, and you've got to learn from those and move forward and really reinforce for all of the audience members, our customers, regulators, and population at large, how impactful, important, and serious this technology is. And you can't help but be optimistic about what the future holds. So that's all I got for you.

Takatoshi Shibayama: 28:00

I absolutely agree. Thank you very much for your time. Yeah, my pleasure. Enjoyed it. Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, give BlockCast a like and a subscribe on your favorite podcast channels, Spotify, Apple, wherever they are. For all your juicy Web3 news, keep updated on blockhead.co. You can also catch Valentine's Daily Views on the market on BRN. Catch you all in the next episode.