Brad Garlinghouse: Ripple is solving a $20 trillion problem

While speaking at The Economic Club of New York in Manhattan, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse spoke out against Swift and called Ripple a better alternative. Garlinghouse stated that banks don’t like Swift and felt that Ripple is solving a real problem at scale.

“You have north of $20 trillion going cross border each year. It is fraught with error rates and it’s slow and it’s expensive. For me, it’s the classic Silicon Valley going up against the big behemoth, Goliath. But it’s so broken. When I go talk to banks, it’s a beautiful thing for me because banks don’t like Swift. They’re frustrated with Swift. Their customers don’t like Swift. That’s a great place to be when you’re selling into that…

We have been so fortunate through a little bit of luck and a little bit of skill that we find ourselves with a lot of momentum in, I think, really solving a problem using these technologies at scale.”

Garlinghouse explained the functionality of the XRP token to the audience:

“The original engineers who developed the XRP Ledger were early Bitcoin engineers who saw that there was going to be a Bitcoin scalability problem over time…

With XRP, the idea was when you’re doing this mining it slows down transactions. It makes transactions expensive. There’s a better way to do that. And they developed something – I won’t technically go into it – called the consensus algorithm. But basically the idea is you don’t have to have mining to verify a transaction.

This group of engineers developed the XRP technology. It’s an open-source technology. Ripple owns a lot of XRP. We own about 55% of all XRP. So clearly we’re very interested in the health and success of that ecosystem, but it is an open-source technology that Ripple uses in its technical stack.”

Garlinghouse also conceded that the crypto market is mostly dependent on speculation, but its real value is dependent upon utility in the real world.

“I think 99.9% of all crypto trading today is just speculation. It’s actually some amazing stats. About $40-50 billion a day is trading in crypto. That is a very liquid market. Ripple is using XRP to solve – I know we’re going to talk about this later – a correspondent banking problem. I make the joke that if you and I decided to have a race to see who could get $10,000 to London the fastest, I would win if I just drove to JFK and flew it there. That’s the fastest way to move money, which in 2019, in the world of the internet, is a pretty surprising stat.

We are using XRP to help banks, to help regulated financial institutions facilitate cross-border transactions. There’s other companies out in the XRP world doing other things ranging from micro-payments to identity management, other things using that open-source technology. But Ripple’s very focused on using it for payments.”