Brad Garlinghouse, the chief executive at Ripple blockchain juggernaut, has taken part in Ripple’s podcast “Crypto in One Minute” to talk about crypto-based exchange-traded funds and their importance to the cryptocurrency space.
This video with Garlinghouse’s participation was published a few days after the first-ever XRP futures ETF was launched on the Nasdaq exchange.
Garlinghouse on what makes crypto ETFs “exciting”
In his short, one-minute-long speech Ripple CEO named two main reasons why he believes that people are excited about crypto ETFs launching since January 2024. The first one is that for a long time institutional investors from Wall Street have been unable to access crypto assets directly to trade or invest in them. They had to either use self-custody options or hold crypto on centralized exchanges, which
First time, but certainly not the last on @Ripple’s Crypto in One Minute! https://t.co/XyDONs7hdZ
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) May 23, 2025
For the first time, financial institutions have been able to go and trade crypto directly, whether it was endowment, pension funds, mutual funds, or anything else. Now, institutions can do it easily thanks to crypto ETFs.
The second important factor named by Garlinghouse was that the launch of ETFs is really “institutionalizing the entire industry of crypto.” He reminded the audience that the Bitcoin ETF was the fastest ETF in history to reach $1 billion in assets. As well as that, it passed the $10 billion mark faster than any other ETF ever did.
Garlinghouse believes that the Bitcoin ETF will “eventually close in on the gold ETF” in the near future.
First-ever XRP futures ETF goes live
Earlier this week, major investment company Volatility Shares launched the first-ever XRP futures ETFs on the Nasdaq exchange under the XRPI ticker. That launch took place after on May 19, the CME exchange launched an XRP-futures product. In 2017, CME and CBOE were the first platforms to launch Bitcoin futures for financial institutions.
Roughly a month before that, the first XRP-based product, Tectrium 2x Long Daily XRP ETF, was rolled out by Tectrium.
Prior to launching Bitcoin spot ETFs in January 2024, BlackRock and several other companies, also released Bitcoin futures ETFs a few years before.
As reported by U.Today, this week, the SEC delayed a spot XRP ETF filing coming from CoinShares.
Over the past 24 hours, XRP has lost more than 7%, dropping from $2.47 to $2.29. By now, the coin has partly recovered, adding 2.08% and changing hands at $2.34.
