Ripple CEO: BTC ‘Maximalists, Tribalism’ Holding the Industry Back

Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of blockchain company Ripple, said in a fireside chat at Paris Blockchain Week that Bitcoin’s “tribalism” is holding the crypto industry back.

“I own bitcoin, I own ether, I own some others. I am an absolute believer that this industry is going to continue to thrive,” said Garlinghouse. “All boats can rise.”

He also compared the crypto industry today to the dotcom era of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Yahoo could be successful and so could eBay … They’re solving different problems. There’s different use cases and different audiences and different markets. I think a lot of those parallels exist today.

According to CoinGecko, there are thousands of cryptocurrencies in the market that are worth almost $2 trillion combined. Some digital coins have attracted quite a dedicated following, not just Bitcoin, whose hardcore advocates are often referred to as “maximalists.”

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor are considered to be among these maximalists, as they show support to only Bitcoin and no other cryptocurrency. Garlinghouse said such maximalism makes the crypto industry have “fractured representation” when it comes to lobbying US lawmakers.

Garlinghouse also commented on the news from last month regarding US President Joe Biden signing an executive order calling on the government to examine the risks and benefits of cryptocurrencies. As he said “The lack of coordination in Washington, D.C., amongst the crypto industry, I find to be shocking,”