During a recent interview at the (virtual) four-day DC Fintech Week 2020 conference (October 19-22, 2020), Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of FinTech firm Ripple talked about Bitcoin, XRP, and how the current regulatory climate in the U.S. affects cryptoassets.
The interview with the Ripple CEO was on day one of the conference. (In the video below, the segment featuring Brad Garlinghouse starts at the 48:00 minute mark.)
Garlinghouse indicated that the reason Ripple is considering moving its headquarters out of the U.S. is lack of regulatory clarity:
“In the U.S., I think it was last week or the week before, the Department of Justice put out a 70-plus-page paper about some dynamics in crypto. In the document, it references eight different groups within the U.S. government that have some sort of opinion about how crypto should be viewed, how crypto should be regulated…
“The challenge is for companies operating here in the United States… it’s really hard to know. You can’t have regulations that’s a guessing game…
“We, at Ripple, take it very seriously. We take KYC requirements, BSA requirements, AML requirements very seriously. But when regulations is a guessing game and you have different parts of the government saying different things, that makes it really hard to operate here in the United States.”
It is worth noting that earlier this month, during a virtual interview with Fortune at the LA Blockchain Summit, Chris Larsen, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Ripple Labs, said that his firm will probably need to move its headquarters out of the U.S., and that the U.K. and Singapore were two of the top candidate destinations.
