For years, Ripple funded Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) initiatives aimed at using its XRP Ledger (XRPL) for inter-central bank settlements.
However, while the company once hoped that US Democrats like Kamala Harris would help bring its technology into the largest central bank of them all — the US Federal Reserve — it swiftly downplayed this stance during the closing stages of Donald Trump’s second successful run for president.
Ripple’s CBDC initiatives date back to 2015, and it continued pushing for them through mid-2024. Indeed, as recently as June last year, Ripple.com was prominently featuring CBDCs on the “Solutions” tab of its homepage.
But within a few days of Trump’s Bitcoin 2024 conference speech in which he promised to prohibit any US dollar CBDC, Ripple scrubbed any reference to CBDCs from its homepage.
Ripple pushed for XRP technologies aimed at the Fed
According to Ripple, over 90% of the world’s central banks have actively explored CBDCs, and the Fed would have been its biggest success. After some success offshore, Ripple tried to market its technologies onshore.
For example, Ripple worked to incorporate its Interledger Protocol into the Federal Reserve’s FedNow instant payment system.
Furthermore, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen personally endorsed Kamala Harris and donated $11 million worth of XRP tokens to a Democratic super-PAC supporting her presidential campaign.
A Ripple board member, Gene Sperling, worked in Harris’ Democratic presidential campaign.
Read more: Explained: Interlinking CBDCs and their potential impact
Ripple has spent years talking about its XRP-based technologies that could support a US dollar CBDC. Several other countries, including Russia, the Republic of Palau, Montenegro, Japan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Uruguay, and New Zealand, have also started using the XRP Ledger to test their CBDCs.
Ripple Vice President James Wallis once claimed that 30 countries were interested in using XRP-based technologies for a possible CBDC. Some of these countries have a USD-pegged fiat currency.
However, Trump has been very clear about his stance on a US dollar CBDC: it’s not happening for at least four years.
Lest there be any doubt, he’s signed an executive order banning any type of FedCoin. As of January 23, 2025, neither Ripple nor anyone else may support the establishment, circulation, or use of a CBDC within the US.
Quick to abandon its hopes of any XRP partnership with the Fed under a Republican administration, Ripple has pivoted to efforts to include XRP within a potential US digital asset stockpile or sovereign wealth fund.
It has already succeeded in recommending Brad Garlinghouse as a top contender for the White House Crypto Council.
Skeptics of Ripple point to various failures of XRP technology as catastrophic for its potential use in the US government. Just this week, its network went offline for 64 minutes.
Moreover, XRPL relies on an all-important “Unique Node List” whose Ripple-published “default configuration” is “very similar to or even identical” to the XRP Ledger Foundation. In other words, Ripple chooses and publishes the Unique Node List that governs XRPL — which seems like a description of a corporate database more so than a decentralized blockchain.
