Ripple CEO: US Crypto Rules Lag Amid ‘Interminable’ Lawsuits

Ripple’s CEO says the cryptocurrency industry is still seeking regulatory clarity from the U.S.

Speaking with Bloomberg News Wednesday (July 17), Brad Garlinghouse said America lags behind other countries that have already adopted crypto regulations.

“What we are seeing, where it’s the UK, Japan, Singapore … even the European Union, more than two dozen countries have come together to provide a framework for crypto regulation,” Garlinghouse said.

“It’s frustrating that we as a country can’t get that framework in place. And instead, we have this interminable litigation coming from the SEC that really isn’t solving the problem.”

Ripple has been the target of some of that litigation. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued the company in 2020, accusing it of conducting a $1.3 billion unregistered securities offering tied to its XRP token.

However, a judge last year ruled that only Ripple’s institutional — and not retail — sales of XRP violated the law, a decision widely considered a victory for the cryptocurrency space.

As PYMNTS noted at the time, that ruling has “far-ranging repercussions across the digital asset ecosystem, which has long argued that its tokens do not represent securities contracts.”

Still, Garlinghouse told Bloomberg Wednesday that the company can’t mount multi-million-dollar court battles for every token.

He spoke with the news outlet from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, with the party backing the ticket of former President Donald Trump and Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, both seen as pro-crypto candidates.

But Garlinghouse argued that crypto “shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” and noted that he recently attended a conference in D.C. where Democrats, including representatives from the White House, were in attendance.

“I think they were there, listening to the industry … it was refreshing to start to have that conversation,” he said.

President Joe Biden earlier this year vetoed a measure that would have ended the SEC’s special rules for custodians of crypto assets. This legislation was supported by both the digital asset sector and the banking industry.

Ripple earlier this year donated $25 million to the crypto industry super PAC Fairshake, with Garlinghouse saying at the time that those donations would continue each year, as long as the sector had its naysayers.

According to Open Secrets, which monitors spending on campaigns, that PAC has spent $13.4 million this year, much of it to help defeat the U.S. senate campaign of Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.).