Our next guest spent four years fighting the SEC and emerged with a landmark ruling for XRP. He then turned around and spent $4 billion rebuilding Ripple into a global payments powerhouse. Please welcome Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse. Brad, how's it going?
Good to be here. A lot of stuff to talk about. It's a busy day. Let's get into it.
It is a busy day. Bitcoin up above $80,000.
Awesome. A lot of stories breaking throughout Consensus and overnight. I mean, what are you watching as we get the day started?
I mean, I thought there were a couple big headlines overnight. I say this, the Bullish deal, obviously the biggest crypto deal ever. I think it's also an amazing example. I think not dissimilar to some of the acquisitions Ripple has made of traditional finance bridging to DeFi crypto, where Equinity I think had zero activity around all things crypto, tokenization, real world assets, and now being partnered with Bullish. I think it's a big unlock for both companies and not surprisingly the stock's way up on the news. Brad, there's almost no one better to talk about this. When we come to tokenization, we're here, the institutions are here, you guys are here. You've done a lot of the leg work to get these folks here. How does it feel to sort of see even with the Bullish deal that tokenization is the topic people are talking about?
Yeah, I'll tell you, you've obviously been around the block also and seen this and to see how far we have come, I guess around the block, pun intended in this case, but you know, it does feel a little bit like a magical moment. I am glad to see Bitcoin back over 80. It's surprising to me that the market has been kind of in the doldrums despite a lot of things lining up for what I think is likely to be a nice set of things where crypto in general is more useful, even your previous guest, more leverable from a collateral point of view. And that's true of lots of different institutional players and I think that's certainly true of what we're doing at Ripple. The acquisitions you mentioned earlier, both with a company Hidden Road, the prime brokerage business, making XRP good collateral across lots of different institutional platforms is a big deal.
You know, one of the other big headlines that came out last night, we spoke about it with Arthur Hayes this morning, is Coinbase having around 14% layoffs. Curious how you're watching that and what that indicates for people who are working in this industry and the broader macro environment.
I have two thoughts on this. I mean, one is I have said for I don't know maybe a decade we can't just focus on speculation as a use case for crypto. And what I think you're seeing is, okay, yeah, we're in a relatively speaking bear market. And so, you know, Coinbase is very reactive to what's going on. And, you know, Kraken, not surprisingly, has delayed their IPO purportedly. Not surprising those things have happened when you're so dependent on a consumer speculation use case. The only thing I would say which maybe is a little bit controversial, you know, part of what Brian Armstrong said publicly was about how AI is a factor in those layoffs. For Ripple, yes, we are employing and using AI across everything we do to accelerate growth. The addressable market, the growth opportunity is so big. We're not thinking about AI as a tool to reduce headcount. We're thinking about it as an unlock and enabler to go after more products, more customers faster. And I think we're at a stage of the crypto market that is just an accelerant, not a hey, we can save money over here. I mean, if you're a public company, maybe you have some different levers you got to think about. Ripple has the advantage of being private.
Well, it's not only Brian Armstrong who said that. I think we've heard that from the CEOs kind of pretty much across the board story. What do you think's going to happen given your perspective, right? Companies are laying off because they feel like AI is going to improve productivity, allow them to reduce headcount. Do you think they're going to have to make a reversal sometime in the future?
I don't know if they'll make a reversal. I just think that some of these, I literally think it's a bit of a travesty for AI and it's like painting AI as the boogeyman. This is bad. And it's like every time we've seen new technologies come along, I just heard an interesting stat actually. When the automated teller machine, you may be too young for this, when the automated teller machine came out, people said bank tellers are going to lose all their jobs. 10 years later, there's twice as many bank tellers. And what the ATM allowed them to do is do more interesting things and cross-sell other products. And so I view AI as an unlock. And I think the companies that are hanging, frankly, maybe sometimes bad management on a hey, this is because of AI, I think it's unfortunate. AI is an unlock for a growth industry like digital assets, like blockchain infrastructure. It's an unlock to accelerate what we're doing to get more adoption faster. And I'm sure even what we've seen with Bullish and Equinity, what Ripple's doing around Ripple Treasury, bringing old school traditional finance, non-digital asset native onto chain is accelerated by things like AI.
