Ripple is betting everything on XRP: Garlinghouse is aiming for the “trillion” league
- Ripple emphasizes that XRP and XRPL are at the center of its future strategy.
- According to CEO Garlinghouse, Ripple has a chance to become the first “trillion-dollar” crypto company.
Ripple conveyed a clear message at the XRP Community Day: XRP and the XRP Ledger are not just “part” of the product strategy, but the linchpin on which the company is aligned. During the nearly 9-hour event, Ripple executives, especially CEO Brad Garlinghouse and President Monica Long, made some interesting statements that should make the XRP community bullish.
So explained Garlinghouse during Community Day, for example, stated that he firmly believes that there will be at least one trillion-dollar crypto company by no later than this, and of course that could be Ripple. Garlinghouse said:
“There will be a trillion dollar crypto company, I don’t doubt that for a second. I believe Ripple has a chance to be that company – and maybe there will be more than one.”
With regard to regulatory decisions in the USA, Garlinghouse was confident that there will be an agreement on the Clarity Act within the next two months: He sees a “75 percent” probability that the Clarity Act will be “very close” to being signed by the end of April.
XRP as the “North Star” of the strategy
Garlinghouse also positioned Ripple not as a “one-chain” bet, but as a provider in a “multi-chain environment”. At the same time, he emphasized that XRP is a top priority internally:
“XRP is the North Star for Ripple. It is our purpose. When we think about what we do at Ripple Payments, Ripple Prime, Ripple Treasury, Custody and RLUSD – everything is designed to build utility, trust and liquidity around XRPL.”
As evidence of institutional interest, Garlinghouse pointed to capital flows, even during a weak market environment:
“Even last week, when there was massive market devastation, there were positive XRP ETF inflows of $30 million to $40 million. Public markets want to invest in crypto. Customers want that.”
Garlinghouse was particularly offensive in formulating Ripple’s self-image as a regulation-oriented infrastructure: “We want to be the most regulated, the most compliant, because we are focused on institutional flows – that is the priority,” he said.
Garlinghouse referred, among other things, to the approval received in December 2025 from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to act as a national trust bank. This OCC approval allows Ripple to offer custody and settlement services as a regulated financial institution.
When asked about a possible Fed master account, Garlinghouse made a promising suggestion:
“There has been a lot of speculation about what we might do in the future. There have been comments about a Fed master account, which we find quite exciting. And there are things we might do in the future that I won’t go into today.”
What is crucial, however, is the distance from before: If you had told him ten years ago that Ripple had “even conditional approval” or even such a level of “involvement” from the OCC, that would be “massive progress” compared to the start of the journey.
President Monica Long also calls XRP “the North Star for Ripple” and makes it clear: “XRP and the Ledger are our reason for being.” Ripple understands its purpose to be “building use cases,” applying technology to real-world problems; XRP is the north star that guides product strategy and decisions.
For the current year, Long particularly highlighted the decentralized exchange (DEX) on the XRP Ledger. Ripple wants to bring payment flows that customers already use for stablecoin-based cross-border payments to the Decentralized Exchange.
Long also proposed “Payments Credit” as a second focus, and short-term credit lines are common in payment transactions in order to temporarily finance liquidity. The idea is to link the financing needs of payment service providers with XRP holders “who want to use their XRP” and “earn more returns” via a lending protocol. She pointed out that the lending protocol is still “up for vote,” but that Ripple is “crossing its fingers” that it will be implemented as an amendment.
Thirdly, long custody moved into a larger institutional context: banks not only wanted to store digital assets, but also wanted to actively push into tokenization – from tokenized deposits to funds, stocks, bonds. Ripple’s custody product should enable exactly that.
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