Google, Apple Eyeing Blockchain For Payments

Apple and Google haven’t shown much interest in blockchain technology, but that appears to be changing, with increasing interest in Ripple and the distributed ledger financial company’s Interledger Protocol.

In a report, Ripple said it comes into regular contact with large technology companies that express a lot of interest in its blockchain technology. According to Stefan Thomas, chief technical officer at Ripple, Google, Apple, Mozilla and other large technology companies have been joining forces to find a better user experience for payments on the internet.

“At these forums is where we run into them [Google, Apple, etc.], and we obviously notice the issues that they are having with the card networks, and we think that Interledger is a really good solution. We see their interest and the fact they keep asking us to give presentations about it,” said Thomas in the report. “From a sort of business strategic perspective, the big tech companies absolutely hate the card issuers, because they are another powerful player and something the big tech companies don’t like is sharing market power.”

Thomas went on to say that the majority of the large technology players’ ire is directed at Visa, which is competing with PayPal, Worldpay and other payment processing companies, but there isn’t much love between all the companies. As a result, the technology companies would rather be able to move themselves. “I think what they are lacking, what they need, is some way to interoperate with each other. That’s the thing th[at] Visa has that they don’t have, the interoperability. That’s why we think having a protocol that gives them that interoperability is going to unleash complete hell on Visa,” he said. The executive went on to note the goal of Interledger is to create a money network that can connect cryptocurrencies, which the company is aiming to have complete in 2016 or early in 2017.