XRP Reserve Currency Claims: What Ripple Executives Really Said

A lot of the biggest XRP theories didn't start with some random account online. They actually start with Ripple's own people saying things on camera, on stage, and in interviews. So, take the big one, XRP becomes the world's reserve currency, the money the rest of the world saves in and trades in. Well, that reserve currency theory started with Ripple's bosses in their own words. So, here's what they really said.

There's a clip of Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple's chief executive, using those exact words. Now, there's a podcast where David Schwartz, one of the people who designed the XRP ledger, talks about a reserve currency Ripple network. And there's a Ripple executive on stage calling banks using XRP the holy grail. So, the words are real. Ripple's executive said it first, then the theories changed the words because when you play the whole answer, you often hear a different sentence from one that got shared.

So, if you own XRP, hear the full clip before you believe the global reserve currency story. I'm going to take six phrases, find who said each one, and then when and in what context, and set it next to what the theories turned into. Somewhere in the description, guys, right at the top, there's a link, and I'm going to come back to you before we pass the 5-minute mark in the video. It is meant for anyone who has made a decision about their coins off the back of a quote they only heard half of, right? So, let's just be honest before we get into the deep.

Plenty of us have been there. We very rarely hear these things firsthand. We hear them as a clip of a clip, all right, or a screenshot of a screenshot with music under it and a caption on top. By the time a sentence reaches us, it's been cut down, and the part that sounds most exciting is the only bit we get. And when real money is sitting on that sentence, that's a nervous place to be.

Now, every clip feels like it might change everything. So, we keep checking, and we keep reacting. So, let's begin where the whole thing begins, right? The phrase that sits under a lot of XRP theories comes from Chris Larsen, who co-founded Ripple. In 2015, the World Economic Forum named Ripple Labs one of its technology pioneers, and filmed him explaining the problem he wanted to fix.

Let's watch this together first.

The problem is that the world's payment networks have been built in a siloed way because they all need central operators.

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And if you have a central operator, there's just no way the world will all agree on who that central operator should be. So, we [music] have all these workarounds like correspondent banking, which works, but it's 1970s technology.

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It's why you can literally FedEx money from the US to Europe faster than, you know, you can wire money.

A courier beating a bank transfer, that's the old system Ripple said it wanted to replace. And plenty of us have felt that frustration ourselves, right? Waiting days for money to land in another country. I feel this all the time. Then, he named the idea.

Check this.

I'm Chris Larsen, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Ripple Labs. Ripple Labs is a financial technology company. We're helping build what we refer to as the internet of value, and we're using distributed ledger technology to do that.

The internet of value. And in the rest of that interview, he describes it as a new rail, right? So, the world can move the value the way it moves information. And notice what he doesn't say in that film. He doesn't mention XRP once.

He's actually talking about payment networks that do not need one company in charge. Online, that phrase grew into something else. The internet value became shorthand for a new money system with XRP in the middle of it. That's the first pattern to keep in mind. A phrase about plumbing gets read as a promise about price.

And as always, guys, this is not financial advice. Please do your own research. I'm just going to give you the facts that I can find, and you make up that what you want. Okay? So, let's roll the intro, and let's get deep into this.

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So, welcome back, Bullish Brothers. My name is George Lee. If you're new to the channel, please make sure you hit that subscribe button. If you've been here before, please check if you hit that subscribe button. We're very close to 400,000.

I would love to get there this week. So, before the next quote, let's go back to the feeling of reacting to every clip. A lot of us hold XRP because of a story we believe in, and there's nothing wrong with that. The trouble starts when the whole plan resets on a sentence nobody's checked. Now, I'm not going to tell you in this video to buy XRP because I don't know your situation, and there might be way better opportunities for you.

But what I will say is what matters more is is a plan and understanding it in full. One that doesn't fall apart when the next clip turns out to be cut short. Building that kind of plan is the whole point of our old coin pro course. All right, you're going to be able to work out your share of money on a single coin deserves. You're going to be able to work out where your coin sit and what your move would be if the market jumped or dropped hard.

So, here's what I would do. I would go to the first link in the description right now. I'd fill in the short form, then I'd book your free 15-minute call and one of the team will talk you through your own strategy and your own situation. There is no charge, like I said, it's free, okay? So, if you're watching this on your phone, tap the more button under the video and you're going to see the link come up.

Book it now before the next clip lands in your feed and then come back to this video because the reserve currency quote is coming up very soon. Now, the second phrase is the clip that a lot of reserve currency videos lean on. It's Brad Garlinghouse answering a question from someone in an audience, right? One uploaded from August 2022. Gives the title XRP creators want it to be a global reserve currency.

So, what does he actually say? Well, the question was whether 100 billion XRP would be enough once a Ripple product called X Rapid run at a full global scale or whether there would be a shortage. And he answers that XRP was created before Ripple existed. Now, that its creators decided on 100 billion units and that rather than a smaller number with a very high price, they saw it as something they wanted to be, in his words, effectively a global reserve currency. Now, listen to the shape of that answer.

He's explaining why the supply is so big. He's also describing what the original creators saw it as. He isn't saying any government has picked it or that any deal exist and nobody has made it official. There's one more thing you should know, right? I couldn't find the original video.

None of the uploads I found gave a date or an event name. The question mentions X Rapid and the name Ripple used it for its XRP payment product before renaming it on-demand liquidity in 2019. So, it is very likely from somewhere between 2017 and 2019. But, I can't tell you exactly where and when he said it and neither can the videos that share it and that's the honest truth. In fairness to anyone who shares it, it is a big thing for a chief executive to say out loud and it does tell you how ambitious the founders really are.

It's a real window into how they thought about the coin. But ambition and agreement, they're not the same thing. And the second pattern, okay, they saw as becomes they want it to be. And a few shares later, it's now it's been chosen. So you can see the difference.

The third phrase goes back to 2015. David Schwartz, then the Ripple's chief cryptographer, went on a Bitcoin podcast called Bitcoins and Gravy. It's actually episode 54. So it's on the LTB Network's own YouTube channel. You can watch it now.

Schwartz had just explained how XRP could end up as the go between currency on the network because XRP can move between any two accounts without anyone having to trust anyone. He said it has, in his words, a privileged position. And that could cause it to be preferred. Now if that happened, demand would go up. And that's the bullish half, right?

And it's a fair argument. The host then asked him, "What if it doesn't happen?" Check this out.

If that happens, demand will go up.

I see. Now what if it doesn't happen?

It certainly might not. It could be that, for example, the Federal Reserve decides to issue dollars directly onto the Ripple network and everybody thinks that's the perfect intermediary currency. And then XRP doesn't get that kind of role, in which case you would not see that increase in demand.

Well, it certainly might not. And that's one of the people who designed the ledger in 2015 telling a podcast that XRP might never get that role. And straight after that, the host asked about reserve currencies.

I see. Is it possible that just as the USD is the reserve currency of the world right now, against what a lot of people would like to see, is it possible that the USD could eventually be the reserve currency of the Ripple protocol, Ripple network?

It's certainly possible. You could also see another government, any country could do this, introducing, let's say, gold, 100% reserve backed gold on the Ripple network. And people might decide, "Ooh, that's what I want to use as my reserve currency because I, you know, maybe the government of China, let's say, does that and people trust them." There's certainly any number of ways this could play out.

Schwartz talked about reserve currency on the Ripple network, the candidates he gave were the US dollar or gold tokens issued by a government. It actually wasn't XRP, in fact. Okay? So a few seconds later, he said Ripple Labs had bet on XRP, holds an enormous amount of it, and that is the main business model was those coins rising in value in the future. But, of course, in his words, there is no guarantee.

Okay, in 2023, the answer was clipped and passed around again. And in the same year, videos run titles asking whether Schwartz had confirmed XRP as the world's reserve currency. Well, that's the third pattern. The word gets kept and the subject gets swapped. The fourth phrase is the one that powers the idea in the banks that are quietly sitting on XRP in March 2018.

Dilip Rao, then Ripple's global head of infrastructure innovation at he spoke at the Blockchain Venture Summit filmed by the Turkish tech site Webrazzi. Okay, near the end of his talk, he actually described the end goal. Instead of a bank holding piles of Turkish Lira or Yen abroad, it could use XRP to get the currency it needed. Well, it could get that when it needed without holding balances. He called that the holy grail.

Okay, the ultimate end goal. He'd also mentioned that back in 2016, Ripple run a project with 12 banks using XRP between themselves as a technical trial. That's ASA. But earlier in the same talk, right after the trial, came the part that hardly gets shared. Check this out.

So, they've already tried that out. And we know that that's the holy grail. But they will take time to get there. Uh and regulators also have to feel comfortable. The volatility has to come down as I had mentioned.

Markets are going to have to get deeper. This just takes time.

This just takes time. And in his very next sentence, he answered the question directly. Ripple didn't have a bank using it at that point. Only money transfer firms started to trial it. Though he said he expected banks to use it sooner rather than later.

His boss was saying the same thing. And in March 2018, Ripple put out a short film of Brad Garlinghouse on its own channel. Listen to this part.

We can change and accelerate how that works really materially, dramatically.

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And I think introducing XRP into those flows will take time. But as I said, every marathon starts with a single step.

Every marathon starts with a single step and it will take time. Now, those were Ripple's own words in 2018, but in August 2022, one upload bundled the holy grail line together with the reserve currency clip in one video as if they were a single plan announced they won't go. That's the fourth pan. Now, the patience gets cut and the gold gets presented as if it had happened. The fifth phrase is much newer, right?

And it uses the same word in a completely different way. In late January 2025, Garlinghouse argued that if America set up a national crypto reserve, then it shouldn't only hold Bitcoin. It should hold a mix of coins. And that kind of reserve is a store of coins a government keeps, a bit like a stockpile of gold in a vault, right? A reserve currency is something very different.

It's the money of countries used to trade and to save in. The job in the US dollar does, okay? One word, two meanings and online the two kept getting mixed together. Now, what actually happened is on the record. On the 6th of March 2025, the White House set up a strategic Bitcoin reserve and a separate US digital asset stockpile.

And both were to be filed with coins the government had taken through forfeitures. That means assets taken in criminal or civil cases. Neither of those makes XRP anybody's reserve currency. And a government holding a coin it sees is not the same as the world pricing and trading that coin. The sixth phrase is lender of last resort.

And that's the job a central bank does in a crisis, lending to banks when nobody else will. Videos linking Ripple and XRP to that role go back to at least March 2020. Now, I actually went looking for a Ripple executive saying it and I couldn't find one, okay? Not in a clip, a talk or a paper anywhere. The closest real thing I found is much smaller.

It was in 2025 at early stages. The Bitcoin mining news site Block Space reported from court documents that the Bitcoin company Swarm had taken financing from Ripple. That's a company lending money to another company is ordinary business. It doesn't make anyone a lender of last resort. So, of the six phrases, that's the one that seems to have started without the words and at least as far as I could trace it anyway.

So, let's put them side by side. The internet of value was about payment rails. And the film doesn't mention XRP. Now, effectively, a global reserve currency was a description of why the supply is so large from a clip I couldn't date. The reserve currency of the Ripple network was the dollar or gold with XRP possibly getting no role at all.

The holy grail came from within the woods, right? This is just takes time. And the national crypto reserve was a store of seized coins. It was not a new world money. Now, when you listen to Garlinghouse on a big stage, he asked about the market.

He's very careful, right? Here he is at Davos in January 2023 talking to CNBC.

You know, I I've always tried to avoid short-term predictions because I think it's so hard to know timing.

That's the man whose clip gets used to promise a reserve currency saying he avoids predictions because timing is so hard to know. Well, none of this means Ripple executives were wrong to dream big. Building something new takes a big idea and they've actually been open about this, all right? And none of it means the bull case of XRP is dead. It means the bull case should stand on things we can check, like who's using the ledger and what for, not on half a sentence from a stage.

And a dream, a description, and a deal are three different things, all right? A lot of theories actually come from treating them as the same thing. So guys, tell me in the comments about a quote from the XRP world that you'd like to trace back to the person who said it and I'll see what I can find and make a video, right? And if you like more of these quotes followed back to the full recording, subscribe so you don't miss them. As always, guys, crypto carries risk and past results are no guarantee of future ones.

Stay bullish out there. Oh.

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