In a new interview, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse offers his take on XRP’s performance in 2019.
XRP began the year at $0.3525 and is now $0.2903 at time of publishing, while Bitcoin and most of the crypto market at large are in the green for the year.
When asked what he thinks about investors’ concern about XRP’s sell-off this year, Garlinghouse told Bloomberg he’s focused on the long run.
“We pay attention over the long haul. I tell the employees that I don’t think about it on a three days, three weeks, or three months [basis]. Taking advantage of what digital assets can do to make transactions more efficient, I think, is a journey we’ll be on for a decade or two. I describe it as a marathon and we’re on mile two. So I don’t think about the price of XRP in the short term.
I think if we can enable XRP to be the most efficient, measured by speed of a transaction and cost of a tranasction, more and more people will use it. I think there’s going to continue to be volatility in crypto broadly.
The whole market moves together a little bit. And there’s times when XRP has outperformed Bitcoin. There’s times it’s underperformed Bitcoin. But I think as you look at this as a long term journey, I’m quite optimistic about where we see the whole market. There’s a lot of bullish trends for the whole crypto ecosystem.”
Garlinghouse also addresses the state of Facebook’s digital asset project Libra.
Despite pushback from global regulators, he says he’s not counting Facebook out of the race just yet and is looking for policymakers to step up their support of blockchain and crypto assets.
“I think it’s too soon to write it off. But I also think you’ve obviously seen a lot of the momentum shift. It came out in June with a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. Since that time, you’ve seen the likes of Mastercard and PayPal and others step away.
Although, I think a lot of that is because of the regulatory uncertainty. I think Facebook took a really aggressive – arguably it was maybe a little naive thinking they could just run into this and do this despite a lot of concerns.
I think, certainly, the way Ripple approaches the world is, we’re going to work with regulators. We’re going to partner with them from the earliest stages. We’ve done that here in Singapore. We’ve done that around the world and I think that’s served us well in terms of building momentum across all of our customers.”
