Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse Uses Davos 2026 To Redefine Tokenization’s Role In Global Finance
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse took the stage at the World Economic Forum’s 2026 annual meeting in Davos with a clear message: tokenization has moved beyond buzzwords and pilot projects, and the industry will now be judged on whether it delivers real, measurable value to the global financial system.
Speaking on a panel titled “Is Tokenization the Future?”, Garlinghouse used fresh data, political context, and a candid view of state power to argue that the next phase of crypto is less about disruption for its own sake and more about integration with existing financial infrastructure.
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Stablecoins As The “Poster Child” Of Tokenization
For Garlinghouse, the most convincing proof that tokenization is already working isn’t abstract theory; it is the explosive rise of stablecoins.
He labeled stablecoins “the first poster child of tokenization,” emphasizing that their adoption curve has been decisive, not speculative. To illustrate, he highlighted that stablecoin transaction volumes climbed from about 19 trillion dollars in 2024 to around 33 trillion in 2025. That represents roughly 75% growth in just one year.
According to Garlinghouse, this is not a temporary anomaly but a structural shift in how value moves across borders and platforms. Many industry participants, he noted, expect this trajectory to continue as stablecoins become embedded in remittances, trading, cross-border settlements, and digital commerce.
This data-driven argument positioned stablecoins not as a fringe crypto experiment, but as the leading real-world application of tokenization already operating at institutional and global scale.
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Tokenization: From Experiments To Financial “Plumbing”
Garlinghouse largely endorsed the panel’s core thesis: tokenization is evolving from sandbox trials into the underlying “plumbing” of mainstream finance. Tokenized assets on the XRP Ledger, for example, reportedly surged more than 2,200% over the prior year—a sign, he implied, that institutions are no longer just testing the waters.
However, he was careful to stress that tokenization’s success should be measured by utility, not hype. The goal is not to stamp everything on-chain simply because the technology allows it. Instead, he argued, tokenization must produce concrete gains—greater speed, lower costs, more transparency, or broader access to financial services.
Without those outcomes, Garlinghouse warned, tokenization risks becoming little more than a flashy “science experiment,” pleasing to technologists but irrelevant to policymakers, banks, and end users who ultimately decide which rails get used.
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Drawing A Line Around Monetary Sovereignty
When the discussion veered toward narratives about a potential “Bitcoin standard,” Garlinghouse pushed back with a stark reminder of how fiercely governments protect their monetary power.
He described the sovereignty of national currencies as “sacrosanct” for many countries and referenced a remark he attributed to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke: governments would “roll tanks into the street” before surrendering control over their monetary supply.
That image, Garlinghouse said, stuck with him because it captures a political reality that crypto enthusiasts often underappreciate. In his view, no serious strategy for digital assets can ignore the determination of states to defend their control over money issuance and monetary policy.
Rather than fantasizing about replacing fiat, Garlinghouse suggested that the winning approach is one that respects that sovereignty while improving how money and assets move within and across those fiat systems.
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Ripple’s Strategy: Building Bridges, Not Parallel Systems
This worldview directly informs Ripple’s strategic positioning. Garlinghouse described Ripple as a company dedicated to “building the bridges between traditional finance and decentralized finance,” rather than trying to overthrow existing monetary regimes.
He emphasized Ripple’s work with banks and financial institutions around the globe, pointing to partnerships and pilots designed to embed blockchain-based rails into the existing financial stack. For Ripple, scaling up means collaborating with incumbents—central banks, commercial banks, payment providers—not attempting to route around them.
By framing Ripple as an infrastructure partner to the legacy system, Garlinghouse sought to distinguish the company from more ideological corners of the crypto world. His message was that durable adoption will come from integration, compliance, and incremental upgrade of existing systems, not from attempting to burn them down.
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2026 As A Political Turning Point For Crypto In The US
Garlinghouse also argued that 2026 is not just a year of technological maturation for crypto, but a turning point in political attitudes—especially in the United States.
He described the previous US stance as “pretty openly hostile” toward key parts of the crypto and blockchain ecosystem. In his telling, that era is now giving way to a more constructive environment. He pointed to a shift beginning at the White House level and extending to Congress, which he characterized as “much more pro-crypto [and] pro-innovation.”
This changing mood, he suggested, is starting to manifest in legislative and regulatory initiatives that treat digital assets as a sector to be harnessed and guided rather than simply contained or punished. For industry leaders like Ripple, that opens the door to more confident investment, product deployment, and longer-term planning in the US market.
Yet Garlinghouse did not present this as a guaranteed victory lap; instead, he treated it as an opportunity that the industry must justify through responsible behavior and demonstrable benefits.
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Tokenization Must Prove Its Worth
Even as he welcomed favorable narratives and friendlier policymakers, Garlinghouse repeatedly cautioned against complacency. Storylines about tokenization “redefining finance” only matter, he insisted, if they translate into hard evidence of better outcomes.
“We shouldn’t tokenize everything just to tokenize something,” he said. The bar, in his view, is clear: tokenization should either make markets more efficient, make transactions cheaper or faster, improve transparency and auditability, reduce fraud, or meaningfully broaden access to financial products.
If those metrics are not met, then even sophisticated tokenization initiatives risk being dismissed as academic exercises. Garlinghouse’s message to industry peers was implicit but sharp: the time for theoretical promise is over; the credibility test now is utility at scale.
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Regulation: Clarity Over Perfection
On the regulatory front, Garlinghouse leaned heavily into pragmatism. He argued that in the US, the priority should be to establish “workable clarity” for crypto, even if the first iteration of new laws is far from ideal.
“When you create new law, it’s never going to be perfect,” he said, aligning himself with the view that “perfection is the enemy of good.” His point: waiting for flawless regulation only prolongs uncertainty, discourages investment, and creates room for ad hoc enforcement actions.
Garlinghouse underscored this with Ripple’s own experience, referencing a grueling five-year legal battle with US authorities that he attributed to a fundamental lack of clear rules. That ordeal, he suggested, is a cautionary tale of how regulatory ambiguity can freeze innovation and drain resources that could otherwise be used for product development and customer value.
Ripple, he stressed, is “an advocate of clarity over chaos”—willing to operate under stringent standards, as long as those standards are clearly defined and applied consistently.
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A “Level Playing Field” For Stablecoins And Banks
One point of policy contention raised during the panel was whether stablecoin issuers should be allowed—or even required—to offer yield or rewards, and how such offerings should be regulated relative to traditional banks.
Garlinghouse said Ripple “doesn’t have as much of a dog in that fight” as certain other firms that are deeply focused on consumer-facing stablecoin products. Still, he argued that any regulatory regime must ensure a “level playing field” that works in both directions.
In practice, that means if banks and stablecoin issuers are competing for the same customer activities—such as deposits, payments, or savings-like products—they should operate under comparable oversight, capital requirements, and consumer protection rules. Favoring one side over the other, he implied, would distort the market and undermine the very competition that benefits users.
His stance reinforced a broader theme of the talk: digital asset regulation should not be about picking winners and losers, but about applying coherent principles across old and new financial actors.
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Not All Blockchains Are Equally Energy-Intensive
Garlinghouse also tackled one of the most persistent criticisms of blockchain technology: energy consumption. He pushed back firmly on the notion that all layer 1 blockchains share the same environmental footprint.
“Not all layer 1 blockchains consume energy in the same way,” he argued, suggesting that it is misleading to conflate proof-of-work systems with more efficient consensus mechanisms. While he did not dwell on technical minutiae, the implication was clear: networks built on consensus models such as proof-of-stake or federated voting can operate with drastically lower energy usage than early proof-of-work chains.
By making this distinction, Garlinghouse encouraged policymakers and the public to evaluate blockchain projects on a case-by-case basis rather than applying a blanket critique based on legacy networks. For institutions under pressure to meet sustainability goals, this nuance is critical to whether blockchain-based infrastructure can pass internal environmental, social, and governance screens.
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What This Means For XRP And On-Chain Assets
Although the panel focused on tokenization broadly, Garlinghouse’s comments indirectly framed the role of the XRP Ledger and XRP itself in the evolving financial landscape.
The surge of tokenized assets on the XRP Ledger—a more than 2,200% increase in a single year—was cited as evidence that institutions are turning to this particular network for real-world use cases. That growth suggests not only increasing comfort with issuing and managing assets on-chain, but also rising confidence in the ledger’s reliability, liquidity, and compliance tooling.
In this context, XRP’s function as a bridge asset for cross-border value transfer fits neatly into Ripple’s overarching “bridges, not bunkers” narrative. Instead of promising a wholesale currency revolution, the company is positioning XRP and the XRP Ledger as tools to streamline how existing currencies and tokenized assets move through the global system.
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The Road Ahead: From Hype To Infrastructure
Taken together, Garlinghouse’s Davos remarks painted a picture of an industry that is leaving its adolescent phase. The conversation has shifted from “Can this technology work?” to “Where does it create undeniable advantages, and how do we regulate it responsibly?”
Tokenization, in his view, will succeed not because it is novel, but because it quietly becomes the backbone of how assets—dollars, bonds, invoices, securities, loyalty points, or central bank digital currencies—are represented and settled. Stablecoins have already shown one path forward. The next wave could come from tokenized real-world assets, programmable payments, and cross-ecosystem liquidity that traditional infrastructure simply cannot match in speed or efficiency.
Yet Garlinghouse’s tone remained deliberately sober. He recognized that political will can shift, regulatory progress can stall, and market cycles can test conviction. That is precisely why, he implied, the sector must now focus relentlessly on building systems that regulators can supervise, institutions can trust, and users actually want to adopt.
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Why Garlinghouse’s Davos Message Matters
For investors, policymakers, and financial institutions watching from the sidelines, the significance of Garlinghouse’s Davos intervention lies in its pragmatism. It signals that at least one of crypto’s most visible corporate leaders is not betting on utopian monetary upheaval, but on incremental, regulated, and institutionally aligned transformation.
If that thesis proves correct, the winners in the next phase of crypto will likely be those projects and companies that can:
– Demonstrate real economic benefits from tokenization, beyond speculative trading
– Integrate seamlessly with existing financial regulations and compliance frameworks
– Offer sustainable, energy-efficient infrastructure
– Compete fairly with banks and other incumbents under transparent, consistent rules
– Adapt to shifting political environments without relying on anti-state narratives
In Davos 2026, Garlinghouse’s message was clear: tokenization is no longer a PowerPoint concept; it is rapidly becoming part of the machinery of global finance. The challenge now is to ensure that this new machinery works better than what came before—and does so in a way that governments, regulators, institutions, and everyday users are willing to trust.