The biggest XRP treasury in the entire world is now trading live on the NASDAQ, and the party is now just getting started. We got new interviews with Brad Garlinghouse, David Schwartz, and Ashish Birla. We got the closing bell, what it looks like behind the scenes, guys. I got everything right here in this video, and you won't believe what Brad Garlinghouse just said about XRP and its future. Let's jump in here. Here it is, ringing the bell. It sounds so sweet.
All right, that's a big moment for the XRP community. This is kind of what it looked like outside. I believe this is Brad right here. Kind of looks like Brad, doesn't it? Lead Ripple XDev engineer. Bunch of beautifully dressed people. And then there's the advertising in Times Square. Looks good, doesn't it? Oh, man. There you go. All right. All right. And then here's Tony Edward at the afterparty up on the roof here. Hey guys, I'm down at the NASDAQ exchange celebrating Evernorth's public listing debut. Today we're going to be ringing the closing bell. Many of you may know Evernorth is the largest XRP treasury strategy company that's publicly listed. So an exciting time. We're seeing the convergence of crypto and TradFi. I'll get you guys some more footage soon of the ringing of the closing bell. Stay tuned.
All right. And then also here is the interview with Brad Garlinghouse with The Block. Here we go.
It's been interesting to see, you know, as a journalist and a broadcaster. So...
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Many big digital asset treasury companies come to NASDAQ, go to NY, be listed. It really kind of seems like TradFi has finally accepted what we've been doing for a really long period of time. You've been on that journey for a really long period of time. Are you starting to get to the point now where you've got like a smile on your face, perhaps a sigh of relief, like thank God those hard years are behind us?
Yeah. Well, I'm not ready to say the hard years are behind us. I do think, I mean, look, I appreciate you saying that. For a bunch of years, Ripple was a controversial contrarian because we were leaning into TradFi as our core customer set. And you know, I think a lot of the crypto community objected to that because I think many of the earliest original gangsters, OGs, the ethos was very anti-establishment, anti- what we now call TradFi. I think for us to capitalize on the opportunity for crypto broadly and certainly around XRP has been to lean in and work with traditional finance. And as you point out, for many years, we've been building bridges between what we now call TradFi and what we now call DeFi.
It just happens to be that the market has kind of come around to what Ripple's been trying to advocate for a long time. And I think a lot of other players in the industry recognize that, hey, maybe Ripple was on to something there.
Yeah. But I think that positions Ripple and it positions the XRP ecosystem by extension to really capitalize on that movement and institutions in the US are leaning in like they never have before. I have said publicly before this calendar year, I made the comment that I think people are underpricing when the largest economy in the world, 22% of global GDP, is the United States. For years the largest economy in the world has been leaning out on crypto. We finally are seeing real institutional leaning in, and a day like today is a further milestone to demonstrate that. And you are seeing a little bit of separation of the most consequential digital asset players compared to less consequential, and I think that's a healthy evolution.
Yeah. Brad's saying here for years the United States has been out of crypto, right? Institutions have not been interested in integrating crypto and blockchain technology to their backend for settlement and those types of things in their bank. Now with the kind of winds changing with the SEC and CFTC and this current administration, now institutions are going all in on crypto, and that's something that we really haven't seen yet affect prices of certain crypto assets, but it's coming. That's what Brad's basically saying. 22% of the world's GDP is about to be all in on crypto and blockchain. Hundreds of trillions of dollars will find its way onto blockchain rails, and XRP and Ripple are one of the main institutional players not just in the United States but globally. Right? So I think what Brad's trying to say here is, hold on, right before you know things are going to start getting to a more serious point here. We haven't quite got there yet, but all of these institutions have been building and testing and sandboxing. Now, it's time to implement and go. And that's what's exciting.
My final question to you, we got a jam-packed schedule here and I'm doing my best to stick to time. No, no, no. I could listen to you talk all day. I just need to be respectful of everyone else. When it comes to the broader cryptocurrency landscape, you know, I made mention of some of the other DATs that we've seen out there that are either, you know, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, you know, there's a handful of DAT companies that are tied to this ecosystem. When it comes to this competition, especially here in the US for different chains vying to bring tokenized equities on chain, how do you see that playing out? And do you have any sort of sage wisdom or kind of hopes of how like Ripple and the XRP Ledger can fight its way back and get some market share?
Well, look, I mean, the recent data is pretty profound. I mean, the XRP Ledger has been gaining market share in a whole bunch of different kind of institutional use cases, including tokenization, real world assets. I will say that I think one of the things that's holding the industry back is that kind of my competition is not the other chains. My competition is how do we get more of traditional finance taking advantage of blockchain-based settlement? Yeah, taking advantage of these new technologies reduces friction measured by cost and time, and I want to see these other chains do well and be successful. It is a massive market opportunity and I think different ecosystems will focus on different verticals and that's great. And I don't view... very few times do I feel like, oh, Ripple's in direct competition with someone. I feel like more often than not, I'm rooting for the whole industry, and I think some of the more difficult periods around crypto have been when we're fighting each other. And we really should be fighting to grow the whole pie, not how big your piece of that pie is. And we'll continue to do that. And I think, look, the XRP Ledger has been profoundly successful over a long arc of time and I think is well positioned to take advantage of some of those opportunities.
Are you still quite bullish on the future of the US? My final question to you, just, you know, given the Clarity Act news a few weeks ago, it does seem like the SEC and the CFTC are kind of like, okay, if the politicians can't get this right, hold up here. We're going to take care of this.
Look, I very much agree with that. The Clarity Act not passing was definitely, it stung, as I tweeted out at the time. I was bummed for sure. I personally invested a lot of energy in that. And there are things to have learned from what went wrong there. But look, the good news is, well, both for the XRP ecosystem, we have a federal judge who wrote in her opinion, unfortunately we went through that lawsuit, and in her opinion she wrote, 'XRP is not a security.' So, we have clarity. And the SEC and CFTC have already leaned into rulemaking to fill the void that the Clarity Act was intended to fill. And look, could there be a future SEC chair who takes a different, or CFTC chair takes a different approach? Maybe. But it's also, there's a lot of, you know, water under the bridge. With the years that go by that I think you can't really put that back.
All right, Brad. Let me know what you guys think about that interview. Also, I mean, we're going to be analyzing this in the days to come, but I do want to get to other things. We got David Schwartz, Dennis, Ashish Birla. Here are the two clips that are being shared most right now.
I'm tremendously excited, especially what's going on with the tokenization of real world assets right now as a key unlock for retail usage. But that's the trick though. We're going to have to be able to solve problems that ordinary people actually have, providing them things like, you know, the ability to find reasonable investments, ability to make payments, on-ramps, off-ramps, all of that connectivity. And that's what's largely missing in the space. And that's where the focus is going to be over the next year or so.
