Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says the payments company continues to grow despite the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).
In a new Bloomberg interview, Garlinghouse says that Ripple is enjoying record growth despite the SEC lawsuit alleging XRP, the native digital asset on the XRP Ledger, to be a security and crippling its US operations.
“The idea that XRP, which we use as a currency, the idea that it is a security I think is just misguided.
Unfortunately, Ripple is operating in a world as if we have lost. In the United States, XRP, for all purposes there’s no liquidity. It has been halted and frozen on most US-based exchanges.
Despite that fact, Ripple had a record year last year. We continue to grow very quickly across our major product groups. Even Q1 was a record for us.
Now, unfortunately, that growth is almost all coming from outside the United States and we are hiring more and more people outside the United States. But our customer base now is about 95% non-US payment companies.”
The Ripple CEO says that the demand for RippleNet grew eight-fold from the first quarter of 2021 compared to the quarter that ended in March this year. RippleNet is a global digital payments platform currently operating in more than 55 countries.
“The demand for our core product [RippleNet] which uses XRP to facilitate these cross-border payments, the demand for that grew 8x year-over-year. So from Q1 last year to Q1 this year, it grew 8x. And that’s on a base already measured in billions. So from our point of view, demand has skyrocketed.”
Garlinghouse also says that the SEC is over-reaching with its actions and consequently reducing the competitiveness of the United States and driving jobs away.
“I just think it’s incredibly frustrating that here in the United States, where we have led innovation in so many different industries, we have an agency that’s overreaching and really constraining competitiveness and hiring people here in the United States.”
