Bessent Puts Ripple's Swell, and XRP, in the U.S.-China Tech Race

Bessent's Technology Umbrella

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used Ripple's Swell conference on Tuesday to place digital assets inside the technology contest between the United States and China, telling an audience drawn from the XRP ecosystem's institutional base that winning the digital asset stack will fortify the dollar. Reserve currencies once drew their power from military strength, Bessent argued, and that foundation is shifting toward technological leadership. “We will keep our military umbrella, but I think more and more it's becoming a technology umbrella,” he said. He described a widening split between American and Chinese ecosystems for artificial intelligence and semiconductors, where countries and companies must choose whose systems they adopt, and he filed digital assets under the same competition: the financial infrastructure other countries select will shape how far the dollar reaches. “We are going to win in the digital asset stack, and that's gonna continue to fortify the [U.S.] dollar,” Bessent said. Stablecoins carry that argument. More than 90% are backed by U.S. dollars, and their issuers typically hold U.S. government securities as reserves, so wider adoption feeds demand for Treasury debt. “I think it's gonna be an important source of funding for the Treasury,” he said, pointing to users in emerging markets who want shelter from local currency devaluation rather than recycled dollars. The administration's GENIUS Act, which set federal rules for stablecoins, the tokens designed to hold a fixed value against fiat money, forms the base of the case. For traders who follow the XRP price, the setting alone was the story: a sitting Treasury Secretary sharing a stage with the token's issuer.

CLARITY Gap, Agency Workarounds

Bessent also confronted the regulatory hole left when Congress failed to pass the CLARITY Act, the bill that would have established a federal framework for the digital asset industry. He called the defeat a disappointment but said the Treasury Department can convene the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to advance oversight through agency action instead. “At Treasury, we have a lot of convening powers,” he said, describing both agencies as “great partners” in building a framework other countries could copy. Rules written by regulators carry one caveat the bill would not have had: they lack the permanence of legislation, and a future administration could rewrite them. On debanking, the practice of banks cutting off services to crypto firms, sometimes under regulatory pressure, Bessent said the stalled bill would have helped prevent a return to it, and argued safeguards remain available: “I think we can set up regulatory best practices, guardrails that will prevent that from happening again.” The debanking fights have fed years of FUD across the sector, and the promise of formal guardrails is the part crypto firms will hold him to. Bessent has emerged as one of the administration's loudest advocates for a comprehensive framework and has repeatedly pressed Congress to advance the CLARITY Act. His path has crossed Ripple's before: in September 2025 the company joined a financial roundtable at Downing Street alongside Bessent and British Chancellor Rachel Reeves, talks that helped shape a joint UK-U.S. initiative on financial markets and digital assets.

Ripple's Charter Week in New York

The Swell stage arrived in the middle of Ripple's most consequential week of institutional news. On October 26, the company announced final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Ripple National Trust Bank, winning the final OCC trust bank charter its application had been seeking. A day later, on October 27, Ripple announced expanded collaborations with BNY and Robinhood, deepening ties between its settlement rails and established financial institutions. The three-day conference, running October 27 to 29 at The Shed in Manhattan, draws more than 1,500 participants and over 100 speakers across three stages, spanning traditional finance executives, crypto companies, academics and the broader XRP ecosystem. Bessent was added to the lineup shortly before the event. Hollywood actor Matt Damon appears as co-founder of Water.org; he and fellow co-founder Gary White are scheduled to discuss how Ripple's payment infrastructure and RLUSD, the company's dollar stablecoin, can support financial inclusion and access to safe water. Tom Farley, former president of the New York Stock Exchange and now CEO of the crypto exchange Bullish, joins Garlinghouse for a conversation on the convergence of traditional markets and digital assets. The Garlinghouse-Bessent moment spread fast on X, where a widely shared post likened the scene to a new Bretton Woods.

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A widely shared post.

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Escrow Supply Meets Institutional Rails

Read together, the three days of news move Ripple further from its litigation-era identity toward regulated financial infrastructure: a final trust charter rather than a pending application, custody weight from BNY, and retail distribution through Robinhood. The open question for XRP is whether that ladder creates durable demand for the token itself or mainly for Ripple's settlement and custody services, and whether institutional depth eventually supports a lasting bull market instead of episodic rallies. The near-term calendar adds pressure. Ripple is scheduled to release 1 billion XRP from escrow on November 1, adding circulating supply the week after Swell closes. Meanwhile, whale wallets hold 46.87 billion XRP, the most since November 2022, so large holders carry an outsized share of the float into this institutional phase. What traders will test first is not the speeches but whether each new institutional counterparty, from the charter to the banking partnerships, actually enlarges the market maker and liquidity layer around the token.