By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 24th, 2024
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, that Bitcoin will not be a global currency and expects major banks to use XRP as a liquidity tool.
On Monday, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said he hopes one day bitcoin will become a single global currency. He supported Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey who expressed the same desire earlier, claiming that bitcoin would become the world’s single currency within 10 years. However, not all experts in crypto industry have similar views on the future of bitcoin.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse believes that Bitcoin will not be the catch-all solution people are hoping for in terms of being a global currency. Speaking at the Money20/20 conference held this week in Amsterdam, he said: “I think it’s not going to be the panacea that people once thought it would be, where it would solve all of these different kinds of problems. Instead, you’re seeing specializations of different kind of ledgers, different kinds of blockchains.”
He also noted that Ripple transactions are “a thousand times faster” than those of Bitcoin, which he described as “quite slow.” In an CNBC interview, Garlinghouse explained: “Originally people thought it might solve a payments problem but when you have an asset like XRP that’s a thousand times faster and a thousand times cheaper on a per transaction basis bitcoin can’t really compete on that level, you know an XRP transaction costs fractions of a penny and it settles in three seconds.”
Because of Ripple speed of transaction and low cost, Garlinghouse expects dozens of banks to be using XRP by the end of next year.
Ripple(XRP) is an independent digital asset, native to the Ripple Consensus Ledger. Released in 2012, Ripple purports to enable “secure, instant and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks.” It supports tokens representing fiat currency, cryptocurrency, commodity or any other unit of value such as frequent flier miles or mobile minutes.
According to CoinMarketCap, current Ripple price is $0,6715.
Many see XRP as a rival to bitcoin, but Garlinghouse said it’s not necessarily a case of one digital coin versus another.
“Well, I don’t really think about it as one versus the other. I mean, it’s actually unfortunate, I think, that there’s some people in this, the crypto space, the blockchain space — for them, it’s almost a holy war of one versus the other. I don’t look at that at all,” he said. “I think that what we’re seeing is the overall growth of this space and there will be many winners,” Garlinghouse added.
Ripple CEO also commented on a recent class-action lawsuit by someone who lost money trading XRP. Garlinghouse said XRP is not a security. “Whether not XRP is a security is not going to be dictated by one lawsuit,” Garlinghouse said. “I think it’s very clear that XRP is not a security. It exists independently of Ripple the company.” He added: “Owning XRP doesn’t give you any ownership of Ripple equity.”
Speaking of crypto regulation, Garlinghouse said it is actually a benefit. He considers those viewing blockchain as a way to attack regulation to be wrong.
“One of the reasons Ripple has enjoyed such momentum is we have been working with regulators,” he said.