At the opening of the Swell 2026 conference, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse firmly refuted market rumors that the company is winding down support for its flagship token in favor of the stablecoin Ripple USD (RLUSD).
“You’ve seen that grow much more quickly on the XRP Ledger over the course of the last year. But, you know, you do read people saying, ‘Oh, they’ve given up on XRP. They’re, you know, leaning into RLUSD.’ We will never give up on XRP. You know, the momentum you’re seeing around XRP is profound. RLUSD is one contributor to that, so we don’t—we view them as very complementary. And when people were kind of, I think, saying like, ‘We don’t get it,’ people—I said then, and I’ll remind people: we will never do something we think is bad for the XRP ecosystem,” Garlinghouse stated.
Five years of confrontation with the SEC (2020–2025) are behind them, and the company’s focus has completely shifted to the regulatory field.
The turning point was the GENIUS Act, according to the Ripple CEO, as the regulatory steps of the SEC and CFTC finally gave institutional players clear rules of the game, completely eliminating the ground for speculation.
While the market is in despair, things are going too well for Ripple
Garlinghouse’s words are backed by the fresh financial report, with Ripple reaching an annual run rate of product revenue of $900 million, having processed transactions worth $16 trillion.
Now the key task is to move these giant off-chain treasury and brokerage volumes directly onto the rails of the XRP Ledger blockchain, turning XRP into the main settlement node of international liquidity.
The main infrastructural shift was this week’s approval from the OCC to launch Ripple National Trust Bank (RNTB) with the status of a federal bank. This made it possible to legalize the stablecoin RLUSD on on-chain repo markets and bring it to listings on Coinbase, Robinhood, Binance, Kraken and OKX.
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Against this background, Ripple recorded a threefold growth in multi-product integrations from conservative giants, including BNY, HSBC, DBS and Standard Chartered, while BNY is already launching a project for the tokenization of trade finance directly on the basis of XRPL.
The current sluggish October does not cause pessimism among management, as the narrative of empty speculation around the viability of the token has officially been replaced by deep integration into the banking sector.
Yet another round of skeptics’ forecasts about the “death of the project,” as Garlinghouse stresses, once again did not match reality — Ripple aims to transform global liquidity flows, where the XRP token remains the central settlement bridge, and speculation about a change in the company’s course is exhausted.
