The XRP Ledger is Ready for AI, Quantum, DeFi & Tokenization! | Ayo Akinyele

**Ayo Akinyele** (0:00)
The general public does not see those transactions hidden from them, so we're basically hiding the transaction amounts and the token balances as a first step in keeping that confidential on ledger.

**Amanda Wickroft** (0:11)
Do you find that a lot of people still associate XRP with the SEC case, or do you think the market is finally shifting back to the tech?

**Ayo Akinyele** (0:18)
I think the market is very much shifting back to the technology because the use cases are real.

**Tony Edward** (0:29)
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Hey everyone, welcome in to The Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm Tony Edward.

**Amanda Wickroft** (2:57)
And I'm Amanda Wickroft.

**Tony Edward** (2:58)
And joining us is Ayo Akinyele, who is the head of engineering at RippleX, which is empowering XRP ledger developers with infrastructure, tools and support to drive solutions and innovation. Ayo, great to have you on.

**Ayo Akinyele** (3:13)
Great to be here. Thanks for the time.

**Tony Edward** (3:16)
Yeah, Ayo, excited, Amanda and I are excited to dive into the details of all the building that's happening on the XRP ledger, including JP Morgan and some other big names. It's exciting times, so we have a lot of questions for you, but we'd like to kick it off with folks' backgrounds. Tell us about where did you grow up, how did you make your way into the tech industry and then crypto?

**Ayo Akinyele** (3:37)
Yeah, I'll keep it short. I came to the US when I was like seven, so I'm an immigrant, and my family has the typical story of looking for the American dream.
And I was afforded the opportunity to go to some of the best schools in the US. I went from Carnegie Mellon to, well, I started at a historically black university, went to Carnegie Mellon thereafter for software engineering, and I got my PhD from Johns Hopkins University, focusing and specializing in cryptography and cryptographic engineering. And so that was sort of how I became interested in both cryptocurrency and also cryptography way back when Bitcoin was trading at few cents. So yeah, it's been a journey kind of seeing how the blockchain industry has evolved since the early days. But my academic roots have been highly tied to what we see today, just given how things have evolved with Bitcoin and other ecosystems and the XRPL.