On a recent appearance on The Claman Countdown with Liz Claman on Fox Business, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse shared his thoughts on the current state of the cryptocurrency market, including Bitcoin’s recent price drop and Ripple’s latest strategic move.
Claman pointed out that Bitcoin, which surged to a high of $107,000 after the election, has since dropped to around $86,000. She asked Garlinghouse about the market’s future and where he sees prices heading, especially amid wildly different predictions — from $250,000 per Bitcoin to much lower forecasts.
Garlinghouse opened up about the importance of taking a long-term perspective. “I don’t think about it in short-term timeframes. I think about the macro trends in crypto and the XRP ecosystem,” he said. “XRP has been the best-performing major crypto over the last 90 days. We’re focused on where the industry will be in three years, not the next six months.”
He also discussed Ripple’s recent $1.25 billion acquisition of Prime Broker Hidden Road — the largest in the company’s history and reportedly the biggest in the crypto industry to date. Garlinghouse said that such a move wouldn’t have been possible a year ago due to what he described as a “coordinated attack” on the industry by the U.S. government, including restrictive IRS rules and banking regulations that discouraged crypto adoption.
Garlinghouse said the regulatory landscape is starting to shift, and acquisitions like this now make more sense.
Pro-XRP attorney John Deaton praised the interview on social media, calling it “great” and praising Claman’s question about whether Ripple would’ve made the same acquisition a year ago. “Brad essentially says no way — not with the boot of the government on the industry’s neck,” Deaton said
