Meet Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse

Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse expects over 90% of cryptocurrencies to “go away” as many have no real practical use. Speaking to Cheddar on the sidelines of the Ripple’s Swell Conference, he said that “speculators are playing with fire as over 90% of currently existing digital coins will cease to exist.”

At the same time, Garlinghouse believes that Ripple will sustain any kind of glitches or any kind of downward crypto trend and will actually emerge victorious among others.

When it comes to the places where digital assets could be used to transfer value, Brad says ripple and its offerings solve cross-border payment problems.

“Ripple is using digital assets to solve a cross-border payments problem. If you’re sending money across oceans across networks it ends up being really slow and really expensive,” he said on the Stanford Legal podcast discussing ripple.

Nonetheless, he thinks that neither bitcoin nor XRP, Ripple’s native currency, will be used for buying coffee at Starbucks anytime soon.

Brad is the CEO of Ripple and a member of the board of directors. Born in 1971, Garlinghouse has a BA in economics from the University of Kansas and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Prior to ripple, he headed the file-sharing site Hightail (formerly YouSendIt).

From 2009 to 2012 he was President of Consumer Applications at AOL and prior to that, from 2003 to 2009, he held various executive positions including Senior Vice President at Yahoo!

He is an active angel investor in over 40 companies including the hardware company Pure Storage, AI startup Diffbot, and Indigo Agriculture.

He also serves on the board of directors of OutMatch and has held board positions at Ancestry.com and Tonic Health.

When assuming leadership at Ripple Garlinghouse said: “I think there are a lot of interesting companies, but there aren’t that many companies that can take their little dent in the universe. Whether you talk about Africa, or underbanked communities, these are all examples where Ripple can change the way society works.”

Forbes estimates Brad Garlinghouse’s net worth between $400 and $500 million. In February 2018 he made it to the first ever Forbes ranking of the richest people in cryptocurrency.

According to the publication, Garlinghouse has a 6.3% stake in Ripple. However, it’s his personal stash of XRP coins, confirmed to be "in the nine figures," that got him on the list.

Ripple is a “distributed, open-source payment system that allows to send money globally through the use of blockchain technology.”

Ripple is an infrastructure technology that empowers financial institutions to make real-time, cross-border transactions on behalf of their customers via RippleNet.

Its distributed tools and a global network provide speed, certainty and reach a lower settlement cost than ever before possible.

Brad Garlinghouse says Ripple’s XRP is actually more decentralized than bitcoin and ethereum since mining hash power for these and other Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies tends toward centralization within a small number of mining pools.

“Is XRP centralized or decentralized? It is very clearly decentralized. I, as CEO of the company, can’t control the XRP ledger. I can’t change a transaction,” Garlinghouse said.

Besides, he believes that apart from other major digital assets, XRP is “highly performant and optimized for institutional use in global payments.”

While he accepts that bitcoin is solving different use cases, the average time to complete a BTC transaction is about 4 hours. In contrast, an XRP transaction takes only about 4 seconds.

“The XRP ledger can handle more than 1500 transactions/second. BTC is currently ~15 transactions/second,” Brad said in a blog post.

Besides, he says, XRP fees per transaction are measured as fractions of a penny, while BTC fees per transaction are measured in dollars.

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