First foray into payments at Ripple

Context

Ripple is a blockchain payments company enabling financial institutions, PSPs, and fintechs to move money globally using XRP. I joined as a Product Manager on the developer platform under RippleX (formerly Xpring), then moved to drive product for PayString - a universal payment identifier protocol - and then Ripple Payments' international expansion into Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

PayString

Payments ran over hundreds of isolated networks - Venmo couldn't pay Cash App, crypto addresses were unreadable strings, and SEPA was siloed from ACH. Our bet was an open standard payment ID modelled on email: alice$example.com resolving over HTTPS, making it network-agnostic and compatible with BTC, ETH, XRP, and fiat rails.

PayString was a deliberately minimal open protocol: run a server, expose a JSON endpoint, and you could issue human-readable IDs like alice$example.com that resolved to any payment rail. I led it as PM with 15+ engineers, shipping a Sandbox for pre-deployment testing, an AWS Lambda path for serverless deployment, and Verifiable PayString with encrypted signatures so senders could verify recipient identity before completing a transaction.

The GTM challenge was a two-sided cold-start: PayString only created value if both senders and receivers supported it, so we led with coalition formation. In June 2020 we launched the Open Payments Coalition with 40+ founding members such as Blockchain.com, BitPay, Brave, Flutterwave, and Mercy Corps.

Crypto.com became the enterprise anchor, making PayString available across BTC, XRP, ETH, CRO, and ERC-20 tokens for tens of millions of users. By late 2020 we had grown to nearly 50 coalition members with a reach of 125 million consumers.

Developer Platform

RippleX was the bet to build products for XRP developers and invest in a vibrant developer ecosystem. XRP Ledger had strong fundamentals for payments (e.g. 1,500 TPS, 3 second finality, $0.005 fees) but developer adoption was thin when compared to Ethereum.

I led product for the open-source developer wallet and xrpl.js, the TypeScript SDK for XRP Ledger, with the goal of lowering the barrier for payments-focused developers who were building custodial and non-custodial wallets, PSP integrations for traditional payment rails, and micropayments. We worked with teams building pay-per-read flows for blogs, music, and art platforms, in-game micropayment rails for gaming studios, and monetisation tools for content creators.

On the GTM side, RippleX committed $500M across 20+ companies by mid-2019, including a $100M fund with Forte for blockchain gaming developers. xrpl.js shipped as the primary TypeScript library for XRP Ledger development with 631 stars and 96 forks.

The tradeoff was tension with commercial priorities. Open ecosystem investment is hard to tie to near-term revenue and competes for resources with the enterprise line. The bet was that giving payments developers the right tooling would expand the addressable market for everything Ripple built, but that requires executive buy-in that's hard to hold when enterprise targets tighten.

International Expansion

Cross-border payments run on SWIFT and correspondent banking - a chain of intermediary banks where funds move through pre-funded nostro/vostro accounts (accounts that banks hold at each other to settle cross-border transactions). This ties up an estimated $27 trillion in dormant liquidity, takes 2-5 days to settle, and costs $10-$50 per transaction. In high-remittance corridors across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, fees run 7-10% and correspondent chains are the longest.

The bet was to bypass correspondent banking using XRP as a neutral bridge asset - fiat to XRP to local fiat, settling in 3-5 seconds with no pre-funded accounts in destination countries. I led product for Ripple Payments' expansion across four interdependent workstreams:

• Partnered with market makers and centralised exchanges to establish XRP to local fiat liquidity in each corridor
• Identified and onboarded local PSPs for last-mile delivery on local payment rails
• Led product engagement with financial institutions evaluating Ripple Payments, building integration paths and onboarding flows for banks entering new corridors
• Mapped local licensing requirements and compliance frameworks per market

The sequencing was liquidity first (everything depended on it), then off-ramp integrations for last-mile delivery, then enterprise onboarding for banks entering new corridors. We onboarded PSPs and market makers across 5-10 corridors in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Volume figures are not public and available upon request.

Reflections

In high-instability corridors, the partnership stack is as critical as the product. One West African corridor was the hardest market we entered, with liquidity providers going under and others violating contract terms mid-execution. I'd sequence legal and compliance groundwork before committing to market maker partnerships.