• Ripple executive anticipates a transformative year for the crypto industry in 2024, with a focus on real-world utility, compliance for DeFi, and greater usability.
• Brendan Berry, Head of Payments Product Management at Ripple, also predicts a utility boom in 2024, with increased funding for companies addressing real-world issues.

This year of 2023 has proved to be fruitful for Ripple in terms of regulatory and legal developments. Analysts are expecting the final settlement in the Ripple vs SEC case to arrive by 2024. Everyone, including top Ripple executives are quite bullish for Ripple for the upcoming year of 2024.

Monica Long, President of Ripple, envisions a transformative year for the crypto industry in 2024, anticipating a departure from speculative hype cycles. She emphasizes the need for real-world utility at scale, highlighting the crucial aspects of compliance, usability, and integration with existing systems. Long predicts that the groundbreaking development in 2024 will revolve around pioneering compliance for decentralized finance (DeFi).

The ongoing “crypto winter” also serves as an opportune time for serious builders to address substantial real-world challenges. Furthermore, Long underscores the importance of a compliance-first approach, urging the industry to prioritize tools that enhance safety and rebuild trust. Thus, the focus on compliance tooling within a decentralized environment will be the next frontier of innovation in blockchain.

Integration with traditional financial players will be a significant trend, with institutions like Fidelity, BlackRock, PayPal, and Visa entering partnerships with crypto-native companies. Long advocates for a collaborative approach, emphasizing that blockchain is not intended to replace banks but can offer benefits such as instant cross-border payments without exorbitant fees.

Long stresses the need for greater usability in the crypto space, recognizing that mainstream adoption requires a user-friendly experience. She suggests that a crypto revolution should not burden users with complex tasks like self-custody of assets, securing secret keys, and navigating decentralized exchanges.

Ripple (XRP) for Payments in 2024

Brendan Berry, the head of payments product management at Ripple predicts how the payments landscape will change going into 2024.

Brendan Berry anticipates a utility boom in 2024, with a renewed funding focus on companies addressing real-world issues beyond infrastructure development. The crypto space is experiencing a resurgence in payments, emphasizing the democratization of finance. As the sector moves back to fundamental use cases like payments, the year 2023 witnessed growing interest from fintech firms in crypto.

Ripple’s 2023 New Value Report indicates that three-fourths of financial institutions plan to explore digital asset services, particularly for cross-border payments, within the next three years. In 2024, an upswing in fintech and crypto collaborations is expected to bridge the gap between emerging and established financial technologies, addressing legacy challenges.

Brendan also states that the dominance of stablecoins is shifting, with non-US-licensed services surpassing their US counterparts in inflows to the top 50 cryptocurrency platforms since spring 2023, according to Chainalysis research. Berry also predicts that stablecoins from non-G7 currencies will gain traction in 2024, offering a new entry point to crypto and enabling real-time currency exposure, payments, and fund transfers for consumers.

These developments could most likely provide some fuel to the XRP price which is currently trading at $0.62. Analysts are expecting the XRP price to rally at least to $1 and further to a new all-time high.