When Anthony Ralphs joined Ripple in its early days, the company was a small team working toward goals that most of the financial world had not yet begun to take seriously. Years later, as founder of Nova Modus and one of the few people who watched Ripple’s institutional strategy develop from the inside, his perspective on what the company got right carries a weight that outside observers rarely achieve.
Building on the Right Foundation
Ralphs came to Ripple as a technologist rather than a speculator, and that distinction shaped everything about how he saw the company’s opportunity. The financial system he was looking at when he first encountered Ripple was still running on infrastructure built in the 1970s, technology that had been patched and extended for decades without ever being fundamentally rethought.
“If you’re building a pure network today that was decentralised and didn’t have single points of failure, you’d start to look at crypto,” he said. “What Ripple were doing was something which resonated with me and actually ticked a lot of boxes.”
The specific boxes it ticked were the ones that mattered most to an engineer: talking to institutions, building out a real platform, and approaching disruption as a constructive challenge to the status quo rather than an attempt to burn it down. Ripple was not promising to topple the banks. It was trying to work with them and improve the infrastructure that already existed.
A Different World During the ICO Boom
Ralphs joined during one of the most chaotic periods in crypto history. The 2017 ICO boom was producing a new speculative vehicle every week, friends were calling each other about Bitconnect, and the broader industry was running on a kind of anarchist energy that had little patience for institutional engagement.
Ripple occupied a different space entirely. There were no ICOs on the XRP Ledger. The team was focused on solving specific problems for institutional customers who were actively approaching them. That focus, Ralphs argued, was not incidental. It was the product of Ripple being genuinely right about where the industry was ultimately heading.
“I have always credited Ripple for being very right in regards to where the space was ultimately going to head,” he said.
The 180-degree shift the broader industry has since made, moving from anti-institutional anarchism toward regulatory engagement and institutional partnership, is something Ripple anticipated and positioned for years before it became the consensus view.
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