Brad Garlinghouse

Brad Garlinghouse spent four years running one of the largest cryptocurrency companies in the world while fighting the US Securities and Exchange Commission in federal court. The Ripple-versus-SEC case, filed in December 2020 and partially resolved in 2023, became the single most-watched legal proceeding in crypto's history and the test case for whether tokens distributed by US-incorporated companies were unregistered securities. Garlinghouse was the public face of Ripple throughout, and the company's eventual partial victory has reshaped how every other US-domiciled token issuer approaches regulation.

Origins

Garlinghouse trained at the University of Kansas and Harvard Business School. He spent the 2000s and 2010s in senior roles at Yahoo, AOL, and Hightail before joining Ripple as COO in 2015 and being elevated to CEO in early 2017. The promotion came just before the 2017 bull cycle, during which XRP — the cryptocurrency Ripple distributes — became, briefly, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

The SEC case

In December 2020, the SEC sued Ripple Labs, Garlinghouse, and co-founder Chris Larsen personally, alleging that XRP was an unregistered security and that more than a billion dollars of sales had been illegal. Ripple denied the charges and litigated. The case dragged through three years of discovery, motions, and depositions. In July 2023, Judge Analisa Torres ruled that institutional sales of XRP had been unregistered securities offerings, but that programmatic sales on secondary markets had not. The ruling was treated as a partial victory by Ripple and the broader industry, and triggered a rally in XRP and similar tokens. The case was settled in subsequent rulings on specific damages.

Public role

Garlinghouse has been one of the most-quoted crypto-industry voices on US regulatory policy. His criticism of former SEC Chair Gary Gensler was loud, sustained, and on the record well before it was politically safe to make it. He has argued repeatedly that the United States is losing its leadership in digital assets to Singapore, the UAE, and Hong Kong, and that regulatory clarity — not regulatory absence — is what the industry needs to grow domestically.

Where he stands in 2026

In 2026, Garlinghouse is still Ripple's CEO. The company has expanded its cross-border payments business, has launched its own US-dollar stablecoin, and has pursued acquisitions of regulated infrastructure firms. XRP remains one of the highest-volume cryptocurrencies on global exchanges. The unresolved questions around Ripple are about its eventual public-listing path, about how the broader stablecoin and cross-border payments market evolves as competitors enter, and about the company's relationship with the post-Gensler SEC. Garlinghouse's legacy, regardless of those outcomes, is that he ran a US-domiciled crypto company through a multi-year regulatory siege and came out with the company's core business intact.