Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse skipped a direct question about whether the company would ever buy the bank, using the moment instead to revisit Ripple’s original institutional strategy and say that clear US regulations are already opening up the demand for stablecoins and payments based on the XRP Ledger.
Speaking with James Hasso at the Economic Club of New York on Feb. 18, Garlinghouse was asked whether Ripple could acquire a bank directly or rely on strong partnerships as it works with major financial institutions and builds its stablecoin business.
“I’m going to avoid part of the answer to your question,” Garlinghouse said, before looking at why Ripple has historically embraced banks rather than confronting them.
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Garlinghouse framed Ripple as a deliberate counterpoint to early crypto culture. “Ripple has taken a very adversarial and adversarial strategic approach to how we’ve moved in the market early on and that made us unpopular in crypto,” he said. “In the beginning of Ripple he said that banks are our customers. If we want this technology to have a large impact on a large number of people, banks are the touch point for people in their financial services relationship.”
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He compared that to what he described as the first crypto concept of building outside of an existing system. “The early days of crypto was very anti-bank government uh let’s build a common universe,” Garlinghouse said. “Ripple always took the view that we would be the bridge between what we would now call tradfi or traditional finance and defy restricted finance.”
That bridge-building claim also reinforced his response to Ripple’s regulatory stance on its stablecoin business. Garlinghouse said Ripple launched RLUSD 13 months ago and said it now sits “around number five” among the largest coins—a result he attributes to a reliance on oversight rather than avoidance.
Garlinghouse highlighted the New York Department of Finance’s trust license and the conditional OCC charter, describing the latter as the “belt and suspenders” of the stablecoin business. “We think that sets us apart because you know it’s almost too much control,” he said.
“But we want that…because we are working with institutions and we want them to consider us as the best to ensure that there is that level of supervision so that there are no questions…is the stablecoin supported by each other. [and]… general evidence on those grounds.”
Then came the cleanest unanswered of the session. “And I’m going to skip the question, are we ever going to buy a bank? Customers,” Garlinghouse said.
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Pressed on whether more US legislation could speed up adoptions, Garlinghouse pointed to an earlier example: “The Genius Act was a stable coin bill that was passed…President Trump signed it in late July or early August,” he said. “That was definitely an enabler … we saw a huge spike in stablecoin activity after that became law.”
He said the same result could follow if the Clarity Act passes, because clearer definitions would give boards, CFOs, and banks more room to maneuver. For companies, he emphasized practical help—especially the “24/7 ability to move” stablecoins—saying “being able to pay on a Sunday afternoon is sometimes important.”
Garlinghouse said Ripple has kept its commercial center of gravity in payments because the value proposition is straightforward: quick, cheap settlement. On tokenization, he was supportive but selective, noting the contradictions in traditional settlement cycles like “T+3” and “T+1,” while warning that some projects feel like “technology looking for trouble.”
He pointed to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink as a prominent advocate, saying Fink believes “a large percentage of assets will be tokenized,” adding: “I agree with him.” But Garlinghouse stressed that the execution will be “vertical,” arguing domain experts, not Ripple, need to drive sectors it doesn’t understand, like insurance.
At press time, XRP traded at $1.4027.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
