Good to be back in Vegas.
I was going to say, welcome back to Vegas. This is our fourth iteration of the XRP Las Vegas Conference. I remember the OG group at Treasure Island.
Yeah. We're much more organized now.
I'd say organized. And just look at this crowd. I mean, it's indicative I think of how far we have come.
I still think the opportunity ahead is even further, but it's been an amazing journey to watch. And obviously some of the regulatory stuff has been a very important part of the chapter of the last four years. I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit, but it's really magical to see the number of people that are here, the engagement level, seeing the XRP brand up and down the strip. It was pretty cool, you know, because usually XRP Las Vegas happens at the same time as Bitcoin, and you know, the Bitcoin conference is in Vegas, but I think this year you really knew the XRP conference was in Vegas, maybe more so than Bitcoin.
Well, I will say our goal was not to take anything away from Bitcoin. Like, I mean that genuinely. Exciting.
I guess I asked for that.
But look, as you guys have heard me say before, I believe in a multi-chain world. I do think, you know, you're seeing the bear market impact and I didn't go over to the Bitcoin conference this year. I did last year. But look, the energy from the XRP community is palpable. I will say one thing that's kind of interesting that is not widely known. Do you like this isn't a public announcement, right? We're just talking just two of us. Who here has gone to the sphere? Okay. I'm calling for an XRP boycott of the sphere. And I want to tell you why. We tried to do XRP on the sphere. We thought that'd be pretty cool. They said they would do Bitcoin and ETH and not XRP.
That's true. That's a story.
And the way I look at it, thank you to our chief marketing officer at Ripple. It actually ended up saving us money because we spent all that money up and down this trip and it's like it worked out better.
It was not clear. Someone was making a judgment within that organization and we thought about kind of escalating but honestly when that stuff happens I'm just like you know what we'll take our money elsewhere.
So like you haven't dealt with things like that for the last several years.
We have fought a number of good fights. You know, I sometimes refer to the XRP army as the XRP family, right? But sometimes we have to go to war and then it's the XRP army and then the army shows up. Yes.
I did want to congratulate you on 11 years as the CEO of Ripple.
Although I think half of that was spent litigating.
Fighting the fight. Yeah.
Yeah. So that's probably not what you imagined when you went into the job.
For sure. And look, at some point I think you know there'll be maybe books written about the whole experience, but it's crazy to look back on that experience. And I do think some of the behaviors and I mean you I think emerged into this landscape during that fight, but you know I also I'm an optimist. I focus on some of the good stuff. And I mean I tweeted about this like the difference of Paul Atkins to Gary Gensler. It's just like wow. You know, in less than a year they provided structured clarity around a whole bunch of stuff. And you wonder like Gary Gensler was there for four plus years. Why didn't you take the time, you know, like you just hired more lawyers to go sue people as opposed to actually let's write down what how we view this. And even if I disagreed with it, at least it's clear. And in retrospect, you know, I really do think there I don't really understand why they made some of the decisions they did in that era.
It's been a journey to get here and yeah, so I want to get into a lot of things even and we only have limited time. So, I'm going to race through these questions. But, uh,
By the way, I thought your questions were Ashish's. But at Ripple I get made fun of for stealing my team's thunder. Well, Ashish stole a bunch of my thunder today.
Yeah. He was talking about the Clarity Act.
Well, he was worried that he wasn't going to measure up to being, you know, your opening act, but he did great.
Yeah, I thought he was great. He did outdress me. Like I went and he wore a tie. Like when he's now like a public company CEO, so he can't say I can actually.
Well, I think we all remember the F the SEC shirt that you.
Oh, we can't say that word anymore. Yeah, I've never sworn on stage. I don't know if I'm gonna start now. That got a lot of attention. That I don't regret that though. Some of you guys know I wore a t-shirt to a speaking engagement at Cantor Fitzgerald conference in Miami. I wore a sport coat, but underneath the sport coat, I wore a t-shirt that did say F the SEC. Yeah. And you know, yeah.
All right. Well, let's bring it back to the community because we are all here and it is the fourth year of XRP Las Vegas. The community is bigger than ever. And how do you think about Ripple's role, Ripple's engagement with the XRP community these days? Ripple is very much involved with institutions and enterprises these days as you've come back to the US as you're growing. But how do you see your role in the XRP community?
Look, I always thought it was kind of funny and strange that people questioned Ripple's commitment to XRP. Today, you know, Ripple is still the largest holder of XRP on the planet. We are the most interested party in seeing XRP be successful. We will continue to be the most interested party in seeing XRP be successful. And so whenever I read people kind of questioning that, I just think like you don't it doesn't make sense logically and it's obviously not what I've said publicly. And Ripple's extremely committed to how do we make XRP the most useful digital asset? How do we make it the most liquid digital asset? How do we make it the most trusted digital asset? And if we can do those things at the same time by selling products and services to financial institutions to capital markets around what we now call Ripple Prime, right? I mean Ripple Treasury has been on a tear and by the way the other thing people don't know part of the reason why we did the XRP and Ripple Treasury ads on the strip is the main competitor to Ripple Treasury is called Kyriba and they were doing their customer conference last few days here.
Yeah, we a little trolling. Never hurt anybody. We had some wrapped buses that said Ripple Treasury picking people up from the Kyriba conference.
That's great. I think yeah, I mean, you make a good point. I think a lot of people have, you're right, questioned Ripple's loyalty, as it were, to XRP. I think when you rolled out the stablecoin, people were like, 'Oh, is this going to be the replacement for XRP?' And
Look, I get it that I also, and you know, maybe this is somewhat frustrating to the XRP community sometimes, but I don't feel the need to constantly update the whole world about our strategy because to some degree that just informs people who want to compete against us. And so, you know, look, we're gonna do things that may not at first blush make crystal clear sense that but I swear to you, even if it doesn't have a direct line from point A to point B, point B being good for XRP, it may be point A to point B to point C. It's all in service of how do we do things that expand, grow in driving liquidity, utility, and trust in XRP. And I will keep saying those things. We'll keep building around that. I mean, Ripple now is 1500 people strong. We're having a record year in a ton of different ways.
Just got back from traveling to your global constituents.
We did do a around the world trip, which by that was I'm not doing that. That was too hard.
We did Dublin, London, Singapore, Sydney in one week, which is not that was too much.
Did you see on your travels were there any use cases outside of the Ripple ecosystem for XRP that caught your eye?
I mean like I've talked about this a little bit before. I mean there's a bunch of things that Ripple doesn't focus on that I think and you Ashish I thought did a great job talking about some of these. The tokenization of various asset classes I think is inevitable. There's a bunch of things around that that are outside Ripple's scope and we want to see other people pursue. Some of those people are obviously the XRP ledger and some of the vision that the David Schwartzes of the world had 13, 14 years ago is just unbelievable to me. You know, it really was the first decentralized exchange. The innate organic tokenization frameworks of issuing assets are kind of built in at the base level. There's a bunch of industries I don't know that much about. I read about things like bond settlement. Bond settlement is slow. It is arcane. And it is absurd to think about how that works in a world of the internet. And I think it's only a matter of time before you see things like bond settlement move to onchain. And you know to the extent Ripple could help catalyze those things to leverage the XRP ledger, fabulous. But again, I don't want to leave people the impression it is going to be a multi-chain world. The XRP ledger is exceptionally good at some things and not good at some other things. And that's okay. Like that almost by design, like that's good because if you try to be all things to all people, you're going to be less good at other things. You're going to slow the transaction speed down. You're going to impact cost per transaction. We have an amazing underlying infrastructure that's really good for certain things and let's invest and go after those things.
