Garlinghouse: XRP's Speed Trumps Volatility for Cross-Border Payments

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse was at the height of XRP's meteoric run in 2017, and he took to Bloomberg to explain why Ripple was gaining traction against legacy payment networks. He highlighted that sending $10,000 to California would be faster with a person flying there than using existing methods, framing Ripple's mission as compressing payments from days to seconds.

Garlinghouse tied XRP's explosive year (up roughly 25,000% in 2017) directly to Ripple's approach of working within existing regulatory frameworks and partnering with regulated institutions. He acknowledged the token's volatility but argued that its speed made it a better choice for real payments, saying 'XRP has clearly been volatile, as all digital assets have been... but it's a thousand times faster than Bitcoin, so the volatility risk you're taking around XRP is only for three seconds.'

The CEO walked through an example of converting US dollars to Mexican pesos using XRP in roughly three seconds. He framed the appeal as universal for any payment provider handling cross-border transactions, drawn by dramatically lower cost and higher speed compared to existing rails.