Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Rules Out XRP Exit at Swell 2026

Garlinghouse Rules Out an XRP Pivot

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse used the opening session of the Swell 2026 conference to reject a fresh round of FUD claiming the company is quietly stepping back from XRP in favor of its stablecoin. Speaking in the conference's opening broadcast, he met the rumor head-on: “You do read people saying, 'Oh, they've given up on XRP.' We will never give up on XRP.” He called the momentum building around the asset profound, named Ripple USD (RLUSD) as one contributor to it and framed the two as complementary rather than competing. “We will never do something we think is bad for the XRP ecosystem,” he added. The company's posture has shifted since the five-year confrontation with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that ran from 2020 to 2025 ended, and Garlinghouse pointed to the GENIUS Act as the turning point: regulatory steps by the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) gave institutional players clear rules of the game, in his words removing the ground for speculation. He had already put his own balance sheet behind the claim in a January 2026 interview, saying he holds a substantial amount of XRP and describing how the token can act as an intermediate asset when one currency is converted into another. Ripple extended that utility case on April 1, when it added digital asset accounts and unified treasury features to its corporate finance product, designed so finance teams can view cash and digital assets in one system. Support is not limited to Ripple itself. Evernorth CEO Asheesh Birla said in an interview published on October 22 that “Bitcoin can be moved and held, but there's not much you can do on-chain,” positioning the XRP Ledger's native asset for institutional lending and on-ledger financial services. Evernorth closed its combination with Armada Acquisition II on October 9 and reported holdings of roughly 473 million XRP at that point.

The $900M Run Rate Behind the Rebuttal

The rebuttal arrives alongside figures Ripple published itself. The company's financial report states an annual product revenue run rate of $900 million and $16 trillion in processed transaction volume, a record for the firm. The stated ambition is to migrate the giant off-chain treasury and brokerage flows directly onto the XRP Ledger's rails and turn XRP into the main settlement node of international liquidity, a role that fits the emerging PayFi model of settling payment flows on-chain. The infrastructure shift came this week, when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) approved Ripple National Trust Bank (RNTB) as a federally chartered bank, placing the new institution under OCC supervision. That charter is the mechanism that lets a stablecoin issuer operate inside the banking system rather than alongside it: RLUSD can now be used in on-chain repo markets, and the stablecoin has been carried onto Coinbase, Robinhood, Binance, Kraken and OKX, effectively a full crypto exchange rollout. We covered the Coinbase listing of Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin when it went live, and the token's institutional standing was already on record after Moody's assigned Ripple's RLUSD an A2 rating on XRP Ledger and Ethereum. Ripple also reports threefold growth in multi-product integrations with conservative banking names, including BNY, HSBC, DBS and Standard Chartered, and BNY is already launching a trade-finance tokenization project built directly on the ledger, where transactions are finalized across its decentralized node network. In management's telling, the October lull does not change that picture: the XRP price has been sluggish through the month, but speculation about the token's viability has, in the company's view, been replaced by deep integration into the banking sector.

The load-bearing evidence here is not the CEO's rhetoric but the primary records behind it: Ripple's own financial report states the $900 million run rate and the $16 trillion figure, and the OCC's trust-bank approval is a regulatory fact rather than a forecast. Skeptics can fairly note that a run rate is an annualized projection, not booked revenue, and that Evernorth's 473 million XRP are holdings, not capital already deployed into lending. What has changed is the structure of the debate: the argument has moved from whether Ripple still backs its token to whether it can pull its off-chain treasury and brokerage volume onto the ledger itself. Our XRP technical analysis tracks whether the October range holds while the RNTB and RLUSD integrations roll out.