Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Defends XRP Role as Token Sits 66% Below July 2025 High

The $15-$20 Fair-Value Demand

The fight now running through the XRP community turns on a question its holders never got to answer: whether Ripple's expansion into products that do not require the token leaves the people who financed years of patience through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit holding an asset the company can grow without. The outcome settles nothing about the ledger or the token's code; it settles how much of Ripple's future growth the token is expected to capture. The dispute surfaced in a post directed at Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and CTO Emeritus David Schwartz, in which a commentator writing as Fiduciary Ledger 17 accused Ripple's leadership of drawing on years of community support while diminishing the token's economic importance in favor of RLUSD and other enterprise products. The message was written in emotional terms and reposted by several other accounts, pushing it well beyond its author's own audience. It carried a specific demand: the community, the author argued, is owed a “fair value” of $15 to $20 per token or more, and Ripple's executives should take steps to support that outcome. The post offers no evidence that Ripple has deliberately suppressed XRP's price, and the claims about the company's intentions remain the author's own. What the exchange does establish is the grievance underneath them. Holders who stood behind the company through regulatory uncertainty and a lengthy enforcement battle have watched Ripple build out stablecoin, treasury and institutional finance lines, and they read that build-out as a quiet demotion for the token itself. Garlinghouse rejected the framing that XRP is no longer Ripple's main focus. Neither he nor Schwartz has responded with a concrete step, and the original post sets no deadline; what remains is a public disagreement over who the company's success is meant to serve, and on what terms.

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Swell 2026 and the North Star Defense

The frustration sits against a year in which Ripple's corporate footprint grew faster than the token's market value. The company has announced partnerships this year with Coinbase, Robinhood, BNY and Standard Chartered, among other major institutions, and RLUSD, its dollar-backed stablecoin, has expanded quickly across markets since launch. XRP, which settles transfers on the XRP Ledger, a layer-1 protocol designed for cross-border payments, has struggled to convert that momentum into demand: market data puts the token roughly 66% below the all-time high it reached in July 2025. Our own technical readings show the token breaking below $1.20 support, a move that put the $1.11 Fibonacci level in play, with the bounce from $1.23 still tested at $1.35 in recent sessions. That is the market both sides of the argument are posting into. Garlinghouse's fullest answer came at Swell 2026, Ripple's annual gathering for institutional clients, where he again described XRP as the company's “North Star” and said Ripple wants to pursue only initiatives that benefit the asset. He paired the commitment with a concession holders rarely hear stated in full: the cross-border token will not be the best tool for every transaction, and fiat or RLUSD will sometimes make more sense depending on the use case. Which transactions route through the token and which do not is therefore a live commercial question inside Ripple's own product line. No executive has attached a figure, a buyback or any price-support mechanism to the “North Star” language, and no such mechanism has been announced since the post began circulating. Ripple has not disputed the partnership record; its public materials present the institutional expansion as progress, while the price record is what the critics cite against it. The gap between the commitment and the concession is where the community's argument now lives.

The Exposure That Outlasts the Argument

The exchange of posts clarifies mechanics more than mood. XRP carries no governance token rights, so holders have no formal channel to compel Ripple toward any valuation target, and the $15-$20 figure rests on persuasion alone. Nothing in the record so far binds either side to a next step. Nor does Garlinghouse's defense alter the exposure underneath: RLUSD, treasury products and institutional services can keep growing whether or not the token appreciates, and that decoupling survives any reconciliation between the CEO and his critics. For a payments asset, demand ultimately registers in settlement activity and liquidity pool depth rather than in corporate announcements, and neither the post nor the answer has moved those numbers.