About Brad Garlinghouse
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, has been active in public discussions about cryptocurrency regulation, stablecoins, and the company's business strategy. He criticized JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, stating that Dimon has "been dismissing this industry for decades" and suggested Dimon is trying to protect JPMorgan's profitable payments business by opposing the CLARITY Act. Garlinghouse described Dimon's comments as "either intentionally misrepresentation or negligent." He expressed optimism about the CLARITY Act, predicting in late April that if it does not get out of committee by the end of the third week of May, "we're in real trouble," but that it would likely pass the Senate if it clears committee. He later said the chances of passage were around 80%, noting that prediction markets had reached the same figure.
Garlinghouse also discussed Ripple's business developments, including the launch of an AI developer toolkit and the growth of its stablecoin, which he said had become a top-five stablecoin by growth 18 months after launch. He predicted the stablecoin market cap would reach $3 trillion by 2031. Regarding AI, he called layoffs attributed to AI a "travesty," arguing that AI is an "unlock and enabler" for growth rather than a tool to reduce headcount. He stated that Ripple has not prioritized going public and that the company remains focused on enterprise clients, including banks and payment providers.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Brad Garlinghouse's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Moderator0:00
Fred, you have already made the distinction between XRP the token and Ripple the company. You're a regulated entity, or you're speaking on behalf of a regulated entity. When folks talk about these different sorts of provisions, you are the person or your various teams doing the paperwork, providing evidence of baseline trustworthiness. What is it like to be a non-bank financial services provider operating at the intersection of these very traditionally regulated financial institutions and less traditionally regulated, less traditional financial institutions?
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Brad Garlinghouse0:35
It's exciting. I feel an obligation to advocate for these new technologies that we can use for the betterment of economic value to our citizens, to our businesses, even to central banks. I think to the extent we can focus on these are new technologies that can be used in that way, like the earliest days of the internet — can these technologies be used in illicit ways? Yes, and certainly we saw the early days of the internet, and people called for bans, particularly in the current days of the internet as well. Although there is a much louder, a higher decibel level called in maybe the '90s, when people were more intimidated by how these technologies are being used, and I think we're seeing that play out in the world of blockchain as well.
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Moderator1:20
I thought it was interesting you described the UAE regulatory as light touch.
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Brad Garlinghouse1:26
Was that described as light touch? I actually give huge credit to the UAE.
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Moderator1:32
Do you have a VARA license?
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Brad Garlinghouse1:35
No, we do not, although we might. I don't know the exact answer to that, but we do not currently. The point I would make though is the UAE has done the work to codify what the regulations are. I think the challenge — and we discussed this before we got up here — I think the vast majority of players in the crypto space want to be good actors, but I think we have to be clear about what that means. I very much agreed with something the Commissioner said. When we talk about regulating crypto, that's an abstract thing to say. From my point of view, we need to regulate the activity. What is it that we're doing? Ripple is in the business around cross-border payments. Our customers are banks, our customers are regulated institutions. You can't have a non-KYC, know-your-customer transaction, etc. There are lots of regulations around payments like know your customer, like AML, anti-money laundering, like OFAC compliance in the United States, anti-terrorism finance. So I think when we say crypto is not regulated, I hear that, and I think, I don't know what that means. Ripple is a very regulated company in lots of different jurisdictions, not yet in UAE perhaps. The point as much as anything, I think it's a misnomer to describe crypto as an unregulated business. In the U.S., you have at the SEC someone at the chair saying it's the wild west. Look, there are clearly examples where that's true, but there are a lot of people solving real problems for real customers, and taking the air and the froth out of the hype and speculative bubble that really was true in crypto, I think, is really healthy.
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Co-Panelist3:14
I think one of the challenges here is there are actually very few people describing crypto as an unregulated business. What they're saying is that it is insufficiently regulated, and that there are certain types of activities — separate out the obvious and egregious fraud, scams, and grift — but there are certain types of activities that are either being presented to customers as potentially safer than they are, or the promise of guaranteed returns when there are no such thing. Or in the U.S., for instance, many investors in certain of these crypto companies, several of which have now gone bankrupt, were under the impression that their deposits were insured by the FDIC, which is up to $250,000 of whatever the deposits were would be protected. That was an impression that was, in a lot of ways, encouraged by the marketing and the advertising of certain types of these entities.
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Brad Garlinghouse4:05
But we have laws about that, right? And frankly, instead of going after Kim Kardashian for promoting a — that case was dismissed, but I didn't actually know that — I think if the things you're describing, and even we talked backstage, like if there's fraud, we have laws about that. But I think what I would...
