‘Ripple Cannot Control XRP Price’ Claims CEO Brad Garlinghouse

Ripple is a company that is well-known throughout the world, especially when it comes to its efforts to revolutionize the way financial institutions and banks operate. The company’s goal to introduce its payment products to traditional payment vendors have been very successful so far. Unfortunately for Ripple, there have been quite a few controversies along the way as well. Ripple has been facing numerous lawsuits and accusations of being a scam, of controlling the XRP price, manipulating and cheating investors, and more. The company, as well as its CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, continuously deny these accusations explaining that it is not even possible for them to do such things. Garlinghouse repeated these claims in a recent interview with CNN‘s Julia Chatterley.

XRP Is Useful, Therefore Valuable

The interview was brief, but it managed to touch upon most points of conflict. After briefly explaining what XRP is and how it works, Garlinghouse was asked to explain why the XRP price was so volatile. He pointed out that cryptocurrencies still respond strongly to price speculation, which is true for most different asset classes, and even gold. He also pointed out that the long-term value of any digital asset is derived from the utility that it can deliver. He briefly mentioned Facebook’s Libra, which is still nothing more than a whitepaper at this point but caused a lot of hype in the crypto industry, as well as a lot of concern outside of it. According to Garlinghouse, the user needs to understand whether or not there is utility to each specific asset class since this is what gives it true, stable value. He then moved to talk about Bitcoin and compared it to XRP, mentioning that BTC has value, use cases, and is well on its way to becoming a ‘digital gold’ — acting as a store of value. But, its network remains slow, which is why BTC doesn’t make for a great payment solution. On the other hand, XRP is extremely fast, with transactions costing only a fraction of a penny.

Comments on Ripple Controversies

At this point, the interview moved to accusations against Ripple, which claim that the company is dumping XRP. Garlinghouse responded by admitting that Ripple is the largest owner of XRP, just like there are crypto whales out there that are the largest owners of BTC. However, he says that Ripple’s main focus remains on the use cases of XRP and how it can be used to solve different problems. The company is also excited about a growing ecosystem of other players who are using XRP to solve other problems by taking a different approach. For example, he mentioned Coil, with which Ripple had partnered up recently and is a supporter of micropayments for content-tipping. Garlinghouse also noted that while Ripple is the largest owner of XRP — it is not in the company’s (or investors’) interest to dump it. As for the accusations of being in control of XRP’s price, he responded that nobody can manipulate the price of the coins with such large market caps — but that claim is highly debatable. Do you think XRP is as useful as Bitcoin, or are the controversies making it too risky to invest in? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. Buy and trade cryptocurrencies with a 100x multiplier on our partner exchange, StormGain.