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Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse is responding to concerns about the crypto asset XRP.
In a new interview with Bloomberg, Brad Garlinghouse addresses claims that as the largest holder of XRP, the company has the power to manipulate the market.
“Years ago, we put well over 90% of the XRP that Ripple owns into escrow accounts that we can’t access. So this is one of those kinds of what I call FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt], where people put things out there without a total understanding of what’s going on in the market.
There really isn’t a risk because of how the escrows are structured for Ripple to do anything that would actually be bad for the market, and obviously, it’s not in our best interest to do so. We’re a major holder of XRP and we want to see it as highly liquid and delivering a lot of utility. We deploy XRP to solve a cross-border payments problem. We’ve been very successful at that. We have a couple hundred customers we’ve signed up around the world, including customers using XRP to manage real-time cross-border payments.”
Garlinghouse says Ripple has stopped the practice of selling XRP on crypto exchanges for cash, and currently only sells the digital asset to fuel its cross-border payments platform, On-Demand Liquidity (ODL).
“Today, Ripple doesn’t sell any XRP through what we call programmatic trading. We only sell it as part of the product and the product experience.”
Garlinghouse confirms the company is exploring a possible relocation away from US shores due to unclear regulations on crypto and blockchain technology. He names Switzerland, the UK, United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Japan as possible destinations.
“Japan has been one of our strongest markets. We have a very successful partnership there with a group called SBI. They’re actually our largest outside investor, and their CEO has been an innovator and pioneered a whole lot of things around finance and technology.
Japan is one of the markets we’re looking at because there is clarity, and I think really Japan was on the leading edge back in 2017, providing a taxonomy to help companies and to help all the regulators understand how they were going to look at different cryptocurrencies.”