When Anthony Ralphs joined Ripple in its early days, the company was a small team working toward goals that most in the financial world had not yet begun to take seriously. Years later, as the founder of Nova Modus and one of the few people to observe Ripple’s institutional strategy from the inside, his perspective on the company’s successes carries a weight that outside observers rarely have.
Building on the right foundations
Ralphs came to Ripple as a technologist rather than a speculator, and that distinction determined everything about how he viewed the company’s opportunity. The financial system he was observing when he first encountered Ripple was still running on infrastructure built in the 1970s, technology that had been patched and expanded for decades without ever being fundamentally thought through.
“If you built a network today that was pure, decentralized, and had no single point of failure, you would start looking at crypto,” he said. “What Ripple was doing was something that resonated with me and actually checked a lot of boxes.”
The specific boxes checked were the ones that mattered most to an engineer: talking to institutions, building 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 overthrow the banks. He was trying to work with them and improve the infrastructure that already existed.
A different world during the ICO boom
Ralphs joined the company during one of the most chaotic periods in crypto history. The ICO boom of 2017 produced a new speculative vehicle every week, friends were calling each other about Bitconnect, and the industry as a whole was running on a kind of anarchist energy that had little patience for institutional engagement.
Ripple occupied an entirely different space. There was no ICO on the XRP Ledger. The team focused on solving specific issues for institutional clients who were actively contacting them. According to Ralphs, this focus was not accidental. This was the product of Ripple actually being right about the ultimate direction of the industry.
“I always credited Ripple with being absolutely right about where the space would ultimately go,” he said.
The 180-degree shift that the industry as a whole has made since then, from anti-institutional anarchism to regulatory engagement and institutional partnership, is something that Ripple anticipated and positioned for years before becoming a consensus.