Ripple’s CEO would like regulators and the cryptocurrency industry to learn how to get along.
“It’s incredibly important that the entire industry recognizes that we have to work with the regulators, we have to work with the system,” CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in an interview on CNBC. “The blockchain revolution is happening from within the system – it’s not going to happen from outside the system.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on Wednesday (Mar. 7) that it will require digital asset exchanges to register with the agency, causing bitcoin to fall below the key $10,000 level. This follows weeks of subpoenas in an effort to get a handle on the increasing number of exchanges.
“There are some within the bitcoin community that really advocated not just down with banks but down with governments – we have been a contrarian relatively speaking in that regard,” said Garlinghouse.
Ripple is currently developing a network for fast, global financial payments using a digital token called XRP. But while the currency is listed on more than 60 exchanges, it isn’t available on the U.S. exchange Coinbase. Some have speculated, though, that Garlinghouse being interviewed on CNBC on the same day as Coinbase president and COO Asiff Hirji might mean that an announcement is coming soon.
“Coinbase will have to decide what they want to do and make the announcements that are appropriate for them,” Garlinghouse said.
Ripple owns about $60 billion worth of XRP, and Garlinghouse said it will use it as an asset to invest back into the digital currency’s development. The company has also recently announced some financial firms that are at least testing the use of XRP for cross-border payments.
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