BRAD GARLINGHOUSE

People who know me know that I'm a rabid fan of the Kansas Jayhawks. My quirky habit is that every Kansas game is on my calendar, and, more often than not, I will plan and schedule flights around them so that I can engage and watch. I have already brainwashed my family to be Jayhawks fans.

I think most of the ICOs you're seeing are not real token use cases. They're really securities, so I think the SEC should regulate that.

As I was looking around, to me, what was happening in the blockchain and crypto world was a movement.

I'm a big fan of what Salesforce has achieved.

If the cryptocurrency market overall or a digital asset is solving a problem, it's going to drive some value.

Ripple is focused on enabling a global network of financial institutions to use our software to create what we call the Internet of Value.

If Ripple as a company went away, XRP would continue to trade. To me, that's the definition of decentralization.

Family is my fun.

To be candid, I think, in retrospect, it was a mistake to work at AOL when I did. I think I had rose-colored glasses about the opportunity to reinvent AOL.

A bank-issued digital asset can only really efficiently settle between the banks who issued it. I strongly believe banks need an independent digital asset to enable truly efficient settlement, and we believe XRP is best positioned for that role.

Some in the bitcoin community have always taken an anti-government, anti-fiat, anti-bank approach to their philosophy. Ripple takes the orthogonal side of each of those.

Blockchain technologies will change transactions in a broad way.

Some of the uses being implemented for blockchain could actually work better with a database.

In the bubble that was dot-com 1.0 emerged Google, Amazon, and some of the most valuable companies on the planet. They were successful because they focused on their customer; they focused on revolutionary products.

The thing I think is often misunderstood about Ripple is people say, 'Oh, Ripple is a centralized platform.' To me, this is a legacy perspective. Ripple's technology, IRP, is open source; XRP Ledger is open source.

The revolution of blockchain is not going to happen from outside the system; it's going to happen from within the system.

I think what Ripple is doing is not just, 'Hey, how do we enable banks' - it's a broader effort in how can you enable an Internet of Things and connected devices that are economic actors to pass a couple pennies.

Some of the bitcoin community come from that kind of anarchistic, libertarian view. But, one reason why I think Ripple has been very successful is because we work with the system.

Some of the people at Ripple I think are truly the smartest people I've ever worked with in my career, which makes it a lot of fun to go to work every day.

PayPal exists because banks are not interoperable: I can't efficiently pay you $10 unless I'm giving you a $10 bill. So we're all on PayPal and Venmo, I need interoperability on the same ledger.

To me, if we're not failing a little bit, we're not trying hard enough. I think great cultures encourage risk and are tolerant of failure. If you don't do that, you're going to end up with a culture that is stagnant and not thinking about the next generation of products and experiences.

If the asset solves a real problem for a real customer, then there'll be value in the asset.

What's happening in crypto - and certainly what's happening at Ripple - we have an opportunity to fundamentally change the way global commerce is managed from a payments point of view.

XRP is a digital asset that exists on the XRP ledger, one of the open-source products created by Ripple. XRP is a pivotal component of the Internet of Value, since it solves a key point of friction: the pre-funding of nostro/vostro accounts necessary to facilitate cross border payments.

Whether you talk about Africa or underbanked communities, these are all examples where Ripple can change the way society works.