“Circle came out and said, hey, we’ll stand in the gap. We’ll guarantee the peg. And it didn’t move because at that point, Circle didn’t have a balance sheet,” he said. “Ripple has on our balance sheet, you know, 60, 70 billion dollars of crypto. We have about four billion dollars of US dollars. And so I think we’re in a position to really have a very compliant, very institutional focused stablecoin.”
According to Garlinghouse, stablecoins are increasingly adopted not because companies want exposure to crypto branding, but because they want a better way to solve treasury, settlement and cross-border transfer problems. That broader shift, he argued, is already reshaping how the sector is perceived.
Garlinghouse compared the current state of crypto to the internet industry in the late 1990s, when companies led with the technology rather than the use case. “We don’t talk about anything as an internet company now because it’s just prevalent in the background,” he said. “And I think that’s where some of the blockchain and crypto based solutions are heading”. Companies, he added, “just want to solve a payments problem. They want to solve a custody problem.”
That does not mean he sees no room for differentiation. Instead, he argued that trust, licensing and reserve transparency will become the real competitive variables as the market matures. Ripple, he said, has deliberately taken a compliance-first route, pursuing not just a New York Department of Financial Services license but also an OCC license.
He added that the sector as a whole needs more regulatory verification and disclosure, pointing even to Tether’s renewed push for an audit as evidence that transparency is becoming harder to avoid.
Garlinghouse was similarly upbeat on the US policy backdrop. He described passage of the Genius Act as a major unlock for demand and said corporate executives are now actively asking whether stablecoins should be part of their operations. While he said follow-on legislation around asset classification has been slower, he argued the tone in Washington has already shifted sharply, citing recent coordination between the SEC and CFTC and predicting further progress by the end of May.
At press time, XRP traded at $1.36.
