Ripple CEO Rips Traditional Finance with $11B Gold Shuffle Example

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has used an $11 billion gold relocation by De Nederlandsche Bank to argue that traditional finance still relies on outdated infrastructure for value transfer. The central bank recently relocated about 86 tonnes of gold from North America to London, but most of it never physically crossed the Atlantic.

Roughly 59 tonnes were sold in New York and repurchased in London, according to De Nederlandsche Bank's official announcement. Garlinghouse compared this process with Germany's earlier repatriation program, which took several years to move 674 tonnes of gold from Paris and New York to Frankfurt.

The Ripple CEO pointed out that the settlement layer can be changed with tokenization. The XRP Ledger already supports tokenized real-world assets, including gold-backed tokens, allowing issued assets to move onchain with settlement measured in seconds. Tokenized gold on XRPL has already exceeded $1 million in cumulative trading volume.

Garlinghouse is not arguing that XRP should replace central-bank gold but rather that moving ownership should not require moving the asset itself. The Netherlands' $11 billion gold shuffle shows traditional finance already works this way economically, and tokenization simply tries to make the process faster and more programmable.