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Ahmed Barakat
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Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said XRP may be the best bridge asset for some cross-border payments, while a stablecoin could solve other customer needs more effectively. The XRP remarks surfaced this week but were originally made on January 22 news.
The comments came from Faena Rose’s January 22 program, The Transformative Power of Crypto Assets, where Garlinghouse discussed cross-border payments and digital financial infrastructure. Clips resurfaced on social media on September 24, more than eight months after the original conversation.
Garlinghouse’s framing was conditional, not a ranking of assets. He argued that XRP is not necessarily the best asset for every payment use case and explicitly rejected an XRP-only approach to utility, saying a stablecoin can solve certain customer problems better depending on the transaction. He also pushed back on being labeled an XRP maximalist, framing utility as the test for which technology gets used.
That framing lines up with how Ripple Payments is actually built today. The platform supports settlement in RLUSD, USDC, USDT, or fiat, depending on a business’s requirements and available jurisdictions. Ripple says the settlement layer is decoupled from any single issuer’s token, so new stablecoins can be added without rebuilding the infrastructure.
Ripple claims the underlying network handles collections, digital-asset conversion, and payouts across more than 60 markets and has processed over $100 billion in payment volume.
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XRP and RLUSD are Atructurally Different Tools Amid The News
XRP and RLUSD are not interchangeable products wearing different labels. XRP trades freely with no issuer fixing its market price, and Ripple’s documentation still describes it as the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger, designed as a bridge asset for fast, low-cost cross-border transactions.
This is the mechanism behind Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity model, where a source currency converts into XRP, moves between markets, and converts again into the destination currency without requiring pre-funded nostro accounts.
RLUSD plays a different role. Ripple describes it as a dollar-backed asset built for payments, remittances, treasury flows, and settlement, backed one-to-one by cash deposits, U.S. Treasuries, and cash equivalents, and redeemable for U.S. dollars. Where XRP’s value floats with the market, RLUSD is designed to hold at one dollar, which is precisely why a corporate treasurer moving predictable settlement volume might prefer it over an asset with price exposure.
The same logic is playing out across the broader industry as stablecoins expand their footprint in payment rails beyond any single network.
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Why Does the Timing Complicate the Read?
Garlinghouse’s January remarks predate the Senate’s September 15 cloture vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which failed 49-50, short of the 60 votes needed to advance H.R. 3633. Ripple called the news a missed opportunity the same day and said the outcome does not change its position on XRP’s regulatory status, citing the SEC and CFTC’s March 2026 interpretation that identifies XRP as a digital commodity.
That policy backdrop is separate from the asset-choice argument but shapes how the resurfaced clips read. Garlinghouse was describing a payments company optimizing for customer requirements across multiple settlement assets, not a CEO signaling reduced conviction in XRP months before a legislative setback he had no way of anticipating in January.
For traders, the practical takeaway is that Ripple’s product roadmap already reflects this multi-asset posture; the executive commentary is catching up to infrastructure that was built months ago, not announcing a pivot away from it.
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