Brad Garlinghouse was one of a handful of crypto executives who made a big bet on the 2024 elections. Now, as that investment appears to be paying off, he’s ready to talk shop.
Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, has made significant inroads with the Trump administration just as Washington prepares to remake the legal and regulatory landscape for the crypto industry.
Ripple launched its own stablecoin late last year. We asked Garlinghouse how lawmakers were doing, especially since the Senate Banking Committee advanced the GENIUS Act to regulate stablecoins, and he said he likes what he’s seeing from Congress.
“I don’t know if A-plus is the right thing, but certainly, somewhere between A-minus and an A,” Garlinghouse said. Then, talking about GENIUS later in the conversation, he corrected himself.
“It protects the dual-federal state banking dynamic, ensures one-to-one reserves, you’ve got independent third-party auditing – so I think maybe I should give an A-plus,” Garlinghouse added. “Maybe I was too hard of a grader.”
Fairshake: Garlinghouse is happy to keep litigating crypto’s mammoth campaign spending run in 2024. The Fairshake super PAC network spent around $139 million on congressional races, including $40 million spent against former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Ripple has been one of the main three corporate contributors to that effort, along with Coinbase and a16z.
Like other crypto execs, Garlinghouse talks a lot about a “war” on his industry under the Biden administration. And though Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has never said anything publicly about building an “anti-crypto army”— as far as we can tell — her Senate reelection campaign shared a Politico headline with that phrase in early 2023. It struck a nerve.
“If someone’s upset about what happened,” Garlinghouse said, “it was fully a reaction to Gary Gensler, Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren announces she’s raising an ‘anti-crypto army.’ If you’re telling us you’re raising an army to attack us, maybe we want to do something.”
Warren now serves as the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee and has said she wants to work with Republicans on crypto this Congress. But the industry doesn’t believe she retains as much power over the party as she once did. “I think her chokehold on some of these pieces has atrophied over time,” Garlinghouse said.
We’re all friends here: The Ripple CEO occupies a funny place in crypto politics – a sort of internal bogeyman. The Wall Street Journal described Garlinghouse as “polarizing” earlier this month. The grumbling intensified after President Donald Trump hailed Ripple’s XRP by name in a Truth Social post announcing a U.S. “stockpile” for certain crypto assets seized by the government.
Garlinghouse said he isn’t really an I-welcome-the-fight guy. “I’m about bringing this industry together. I stand by this,” Garlinghouse told us. Crypto’s “tribalism,” he added, “has been damaging to the industry.”
And as far as future government stockpiles-and-or-reserves go, Garlinghouse said he’d prefer the Feds refrain from picking “winners and losers.”
A lot of crypto advocates point to the U.S. government’s hands-off policy to the 1990s’ internet as a model for digital assets. Garlinghouse prefers going back further.
“In the 1970s, when the microchip industry was nascent, Intel had dominant market share. If the U.S. government said, ‘we’re only gonna use Intel microchips,’ would we have the chip industry we have today? Would Nvidia exist? Would AMD exist?” Garlinghouse said. “It doesn’t make sense to me, as a U.S. citizen.”
One last thing: We asked the Ripple CEO what he’s thinking about beyond the industry’s current policy priorities.
“The ability to manage identity on blockchains, I think, is important,” Garlinghouse said. “I don’t think we’re going to see anything legislatively or Washington-based, but I think it’s just a big category that we as an industry need to advance on.”
– Brendan Pedersen
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