Cory Johnson is out at distributed ledger startup Ripple as its chief market strategist, CoinDesk has learned.
Tom Channick, a Ripple spokesperson, confirmed the move to CoinDesk after it emerged on social media that references to Ripple and Johnson’s role at the company appeared to have been scrubbed from his Twitter account.
Channick sent the following statement to CoinDesk:
“Cory’s last year at Ripple was a success in representing the company to investors, press and regulators. Cory helped Ripple with strategy internally and overall industry education. But due to changes in market conditions, we’ve chosen to eliminate the role of Chief Market Strategist.”
Joining Ripple in early 2018 after eight years at Bloomberg TV, Johnson explained at the time to CNBC that his role would be “to try and explain, listen and set strategies to make it easy for Wall Street and the world of finance to understand what we’re doing.” Indeed, Johnson served as a key spokesperson for the company, making appearances on mainstream media platforms and evangelizing Ripple’s offerings.
At the World Blockchain Forum on November, Johnson participated in a fireside chat with CoinDesk. When asked about Brad Garlinghouse’s prediction earlier in 2018 that “dozens” of banks would be on Ripple before 2019 began, Johnson put some of the blame on major banks’ failure to provide a custody solution.
That said, he argued that the sense for crypto in the business community was changing.
“I sat with a bunch of people, a major customer, yesterday and there were 10 people in the room they had a lot of questions,” he said at the time. “But I’ll also tell you when there’s 10 people in the room there no deal getting signed. So there’s still some exploration happening and I don’t know where our customer count is going to be.”
Johnson could not be immediately reached for comment.
Ripple logo on keyboard image via Shutterstock