Ripple CEO Debunks Control Claims, Cites $150M Theft

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has weighed in on claims that his company controls XRP. He rejected the assertion, calling it 'fundamentally not true.'

Garlinghouse pointed to a wider problem in the industry: false claims are often deliberate and spread with bad intent.

He emphasized that the XRP Ledger is open source and decentralized. Ripple runs 2% of its validators, while independent parties run the other 98%. Garlinghouse acknowledged that Ripple holds a large amount of XRP but said this gives it no say in governance. The ledger is not a proof-of-stake network, he explained.

Garlinghouse cited a theft about 18 months ago, when $150 million in XRP was stolen from Ripple's founder. If Ripple controlled XRP, he argued, it would have reversed the transfer. It could not. Some of the funds were recovered, but only because centralized exchanges froze them and the FBI became involved.