Introducing Swell by Ripple

Photo credits here

If you have been following Ripple closely then you've probably heard of Swell, a new conference taking place in Toronto, Canada from October 16-18th. The goal of this conference is to bring leaders in banking and blockchain who are committed to changing the way we transfer money. What is quite interesting about this is on the same weekend, SWIFT hosts it's own banking conference in Toronto from October 16-19th. This event is called Sibos, and here is a quote from their website:

"Sibos is the global financial services networking event organised by SWIFT. The annual conference and exhibition connects more than 8,000 executives, decision makers and thought leaders from across the industry."

This is like a jab straight to the face of SWIFT by Ripple, they are challenging head on a 40 year old industry that has yet to face a serious competitor. Ripple's decision to launch this event was to meet their customers demands, who have been asking for the past year to have a forum for customers apart of the Ripple Net to meet and expand their networks. Ripple has been apart of Sibos the last two years, and they definitely were poking the bear last year (Ripple has a booth again this year at Sibos). Per Finextra, Ripple was throwing around some aggressive tweets, asking if SWIFT's Global Payment Innovation Inititative (GPII) was truly as innovative as they were making it out to be. Ripple was very blunt about the capabilities of SWIFT's current system last year, from having failure rates up to 12% of the time and also the system being very costly and not time efficient. Even GPII is just an improvement in speed on top of an archaic system. Here is a statement from Ripple on SWIFT's GPII:

"Swift’s GPII will continue to mandate its 140-character message for payment instructions; that much has not changed," the firm states. "Unfortunately, important data such as invoices are not permitted. The existing flaws caused by the serial process are not addressed. Swift has not actually innovated the core of this messaging system; GPII is an iteration of exactly what Swift provides today with a marginal increase in speed for availability of funds."

Click here for more info on Ripple vs. SWIFT.

Event Proximity

Did I mention how close in proximity these events are (check image below), they are about mile apart from each other. Ripple created this event to put themselves up their not just as a contender, but a real threat to Swift.

Speakers

The two keynote speakers for the event are Ben Bernanke and Sir Tim Berners-Lee. For those that don't know Ben Bernanke was the former Chairman of Federal Reserve from 2006-2014. Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web, that thing we use and rely on everyday now. These are heavy hitters in their realm, and these speakers have connections in power that can help Ripple combine the power of the internet and financial services.

Here are the rest of the speakers listed so far, with full list being announced on September 12th:

• Brad Garlinghouse, CEO, Ripple
• Stefan Thomas, CTO, Ripple
• Dilip Rao, Managing Director of APAC/MENA, Ripple
• Amit Sethi, CIO, Axis Bank
• Tom Jessop, President, Chain Inc.
• Kristen Michaud, Managing Director, Treasury Operations, GE Capital
• Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger
• Ed Metzger, Head of Innovation, Santander
• Mr. Nobuo Ando, Representative Director, SBI Remit Co., Ltd
• Takashi Okita, CEO, SBI Ripple Asia
• Dr. Arak Sutivong, Head of Strategy, Siam Commercial Bank
• Rahul Pai, COO, UAE Exchange
• Marwan Forzley, CEO, Veem
• Dharmesh Desai, Group EVP, Yes Bank

This has been long coming and thanks to blockchain technology it is almost here, sending value as fast as we send information. Banks have been looking for an easy, low cost, high speed system to send money to satisfy their customers who are getting more accustom to speed in their daily lives. Having to wait 2-5 days for a international bank to transfer money on top of the fee to send it inhibits the free flow of capital. It also cost banks money when a transfer doesn't go through (false-positive). This is why it is imperative that banks find a solution to solve these issues, that is where Ripple steps in.

Ripple's Price

For any fellow Ripple Hodlers out their, it was a good day on August 21st. The news and rumors surrounding this event sent Ripple's price up nearly 95%. This is in big part thanks to South Korea, as their exchanges had a good majority of the volume (South Korean exchanges currently have about 55% of the volume per Coin Market Cap data). Ripple's volume peaked at about $2.3 billion on August 23rd along with it's price around $0.295 from $0.15 on August 21st. This was all on speculation and rumor of three gifs on Twitter (3, 2, 1)... Yes, I said three gifs. Buy the rumor, sell the news they say. This stands true as Ripple's price fell back down over the past 9 days since the announcement, and is now sitting around $0.22. For anyone who is new to crypto, news plays a big role in price changes. Unlike the stock market where stocks will take on pretty bad news without budging, the same cannot be said for cryptocurrency markets. Prices will change because some twat on 4chan says the founder of your coin has died. This actually happened back in June, when rumors were spread across the internet that co-founders of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin and Travis Sellmon died in a car accident. This was obviously untrue, but that wasn't before $4 billion in market cap was wiped out due to panic selling.

With the hype around the countdown suppressed now, Ripple's prices have stabilized. A conservative price target for Ripple would be around $1 at January 1, 2018 (I hate speculating, but wanted to throw my 2 cents in here). This isn't anything ridiculous considering, Ripple's coin was up 4000% earlier this year, a 400% increase in price would not be out of the ball park. The cryptocurrency market cap is growing every day now, with Ripple being in the top 5 crypto's and having a good chunk of the market cap, it's safe to assume as the crypto market cap grows, so will Ripple's.

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Disclaimer: The author has a stake in Ripple. This is not investment advice, always do your own research. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment based on your own personal circumstances.