Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Explains Why XRP Beats Bitcoin for Payments

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says the problem with today’s payment apps isn’t complicated. They just weren’t built to talk to each other.

Speaking at an event, Garlinghouse compared modern payment networks to the earliest days of the internet. Garlinghouse compared today’s payment apps to old closed networks like AOL once, pointing out that Venmo and PayPal couldn’t move money between each other until recently, despite PayPal owning Venmo.

Why sending money overseas is still so painful

Garlinghouse said the highest friction in the entire payments system shows up when people try to send money internationally. It’s slow, expensive, and prone to mistakes, sometimes leaving money stuck in transit for weeks while people track it down. That’s the problem Ripple set out to solve.

What actually makes XRP useful

Garlinghouse was careful to frame the technology in terms customers actually care about, not jargon. An XRP transaction settles in about four seconds anywhere in the world, he said. Moving money using XRP costs just fractions of a penny per transaction, he said, framing speed and cost as the only two things that matter to the people actually using the technology.

He drew a direct comparison to Bitcoin to make the point clearer. A Bitcoin transaction can cost close to $10 and take up to 10 minutes to settle, according to Garlinghouse, who was quick to add that this isn’t a knock against Bitcoin. Different blockchains, he said, are simply built for different jobs, the same way different internet protocols serve different purposes.

Selling to banks, not individuals

Rather than pitching XRP to individual users, Ripple chose to sell its technology directly to banks and financial institutions worldwide. Garlinghouse also referenced the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple, noting that it left the company’s US business largely stagnant for roughly five years before the situation eventually shifted.

A quick word on what blockchain actually is

Garlinghouse also offered a plain-language explanation of blockchain itself: an open ledger of debits and credits that anyone can view, where past transactions can never be altered. For Ripple, the goal was never to use blockchain because it’s an interesting technology. It was to apply it to a real problem that financial institutions and their customers already have.