Ripple Swell Definition

What Is Ripple Swell?

Ripple Swell is the annual conference held by the American technology company Ripple. It is a private event for Ripple customers, prospects, and partners only. In 2021, multiple on-demand Swell experiences were offered. Due to the pandemic, Ripple Swell was held virtually in 2020. In October 2019, the conference was held in the city-state island of Singapore. For the 2022 event, it will be held in London, UK, and virtually.

Originally named OpenCoin, Ripple Labs was formed in 2013. Its chief product was the Ripple payments protocol and the cryptocurrency XRP. As of Sept. 24, 2022, XRP is the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Understanding Ripple Swell

As a somewhat unusual entity (a corporation that represents a cryptocurrency), Ripple decided to lean into its unique profile by creating a yearly conference called Swell, a broad, interactive conference that brought together many of the top figures in the digital currency and blockchain worlds. The Ripple team first announced the conference in August of 2017, and the first events took place the following October.

Ripple said customers had "requested that Ripple bring together leaders in banking and blockchain who are committed to changing the way the world moves money today." The result of those requests was the conference.

Ripple Swell 2017

The first iteration of Swell was called "Swell: The Future is Here." It was held in Toronto and took place from October 16–18 in 2017. The first Swell conference centered on discussions of ways that blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies could work toward transforming the way that traditional financial systems are built.

Featured keynote speakers included Dr. Ben Bernanke, former chair of the Federal Reserve, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, early Internet guru and inventor of the world wide web. Don Tapscott, the co-author of the book "Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World," was also featured as a speaker.

According to the Swell website, the event was billed as featuring "a roster of payments experts and industry luminaries." The event itself was an opportunity for those major players to meet and "discuss trends, success stories of blockchain implementations and real-world blockchain use cases to meet changing customer demands for global payments."

The Ripple website indicates that the agenda for the Swell summit in 2017 included a diverse array of events, including a session geared toward RippleNet customers, offering users of the global payment system the chance to discuss the ways that they have integrated Ripple into their own global payment practices. Other sessions focused on regulation in the cryptocurrency space or on trends in the digital asset world.

Swell in 2017 also featured a number of representatives from "first-mover banks," each of whom discussed their own specific use cases involving ripple and related technology. These speakers commented on the opportunities that new payment processing companies may be able to discover in the traditional banking model, as well as potential problems and barriers they may encounter in the process as well.

One of the brightest cryptocurrency stars to feature in the Swell conference was Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Buterin participated on a panel that offered commentary on the many practical uses of blockchain technology and how they expect that blockchain will continue to develop into the future.

Ripple Swell 2019

The 2019 Ripple Swell was held in Singapore at the end of 2019. The keynote speakers included Kamal Quadir, CEO of bKash, Chan Heng Chee Ambassador-at-Large for the Singapore Foreign Ministry, and Raghuram Rajan the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at Chicago University's Booth School of Business.

The price of XRP swooned opening day, and pundits speculated this might be due to a lack of big announcements coming from the company. But CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the drop in price XRP's price was immaterial to the success of Ripple. He went on the make the apocalyptic claim that there is a mass extinction event looming across crypto markets, with only 1% of current coins surviving. Naturally, XRP is in the 1%. “I don’t think about the price of XRP in the short term,” he said.

Ripple also delivered a litany of good news at Swell 2019: Ripple surpassed 300 customers consisting of a global network of banks, financial institutions, and payment providers; Ripple's On-Demand Liquidity product announced just a year ago has several new customers including goLance, Viamericas, FlashFX, and Interbank Peru; moreover, the number of transactions using ODL from the end of Q1 to the end of October grew 7X.