Welcome back to the starting block. We're broadcasting live from the NASDAQ as Evernorth rings the closing bell in a couple of hours' time. It's a great pleasure to welcome Brad Garlinghouse to the show. You will know him as the CEO of Ripple. Brad, it's the first time we've actually sat down for an interview. We've met a couple of times in the past. So, welcome to the show. It's great to catch up with you.
I really appreciate you inviting me. It's a special day.
It is a special day. I mean, you were just saying to me off air, you haven't actually done something like this at the NASDAQ before. So, a first for you. Talk to me a little bit about your involvement with Evernorth.
Well, look, it's a first for me and I think it's a special day for Evernorth, a special day for the XRP community, and I think we all should kind of take a moment to appreciate how far we have come. You know, in all seriousness, the market — there are a couple hundred various DATs trying to get public, and although, you know, not a simple journey, the fact that we are here today with XRP and trading is a big deal. And I give the team — I mean, Ashish has — Ashish Burles as CEO used to work for me at Ripple. He's been an extraordinary leader, and, you know, I'm proud of what he's achieved, I'm proud of what the team he has built has achieved, and I think this only furthers liquidity, furthers trust in the XRP ecosystem, and, you know, it's an honor to be here to support them.
Yeah. I wanted to talk to you a bit about the actual DAT landscape, right? You've got the likes of Michael Saylor who really pioneered, you know, Bitcoin treasury companies, and what he's done with Strategy has been really impressive. You've got a handful of other incumbents there that are doing amazing things. Then you've got Tom Lee and Bitmine, you know, Sharl Link, and a handful of other alternative cryptocurrency DATs or digital asset DATs. Tell me what, in your mind, is the fundamental sort of value proposition here for Evernorth and an XRP DAT.
Well, look, I'll let the team at Evernorth and Ashish kind of speak specifically to some of their strategies. What I find most compelling, and as I understand some of the things I've heard them talk about, is the ability to leverage even some of the on-chain capabilities to leverage yield and building more of the institutional products that can actually drive more than just a buy and hold. And look, that alone is a compelling play — buy and hold — because you're opening up and unlocking an audience that can't access easily the crypto markets in the same way. So I think just that is a major step. And I think, as I mentioned earlier, Ashish has built a really impressive team, and I think you're going to see some interesting leverage and yield opportunities, some on-chain, some off-chain, that will be unique and differentiated, that I think positions XRP to perform really well.
Yeah. Ripple contributed a significant sum of XRP tokens to Evernorth. Can you talk a little bit about why and how you hope to see those tokens be put to use?
Well, look, I mean, as you probably know well, and, you know, we've not done on-air stuff, but, you know, Ripple has since really its inception looked at how do we invest in the ecosystem? How do we support the community? And honestly, that's even gone outside of XRP at times. You know, we do believe in a multi-chain world. We think the XRP Ledger will be used in ways where it really shines and is unique. But, you know, I think Ripple wanted to get behind these guys. When Ashish raised his hand and expressed interest, you know, that to me cemented our interest, because he really has been over the years, both inside Ripple and then when he chose to go off and kind of exercise his own entrepreneurial dreams, he really has just demonstrated unique acumen around talent, around strategy. And, as I said earlier, I just think he's been an extraordinary leader, both for Evernorth and what he helped build and get started at Ripple that we've been fortunate enough to be able to continue to build upon.
It's been interesting to see, you know, as a journalist and a broadcaster, so many big digital asset treasury companies come to NASDAQ, go to NYSE, 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.
