Topeka Native Brad Garlinghouse Is Worth $9 Billion With Rise Of Ripple

                            Brad Garlinghouse Photo by Heather Hooper

Story By Michael Hooper

Brad Garlinghouse, 46, a graduate of Topeka High School, University of Kansas and Harvard Business School, is a newly minted billionaire, according to Forbes.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse owns a 6.3% stake in Ripple, a San Francisco-based company. He also owns additional XRP tokens. He has a net worth of at least $9.5 billion, Forbes said. XRP tokens exploded in value in 2017, up from $0.006 on Jan. 1, 2017, to $2.30 on Dec. 31, 2017, — a return of 38,000%. 

The chart from Coinmarketcap.com shows the rise of Ripple in the last quarter of 2017.

Garlinghouse is the son of Kent and Susan Garlinghouse in Topeka.

Brad Garlinghouse has spoken widely about Ripple on business news channels like Fox Business and CNBC. When asked about Ripple, he says the company sells a blockchain technology to banks and payment providers to do real time settlement between banks. He says the current banking system for settlement between U.S. and foreign banks is lengthy and time consuming, it is faster to get on a plane and fly the money to London from New York than to send it through the current banking system.

Over 100 banks have joined Ripple. Most banks pay other banks to make those settlements. Anytime you can do something without that central counter party and go direct peer to peer, this saves time and money.

Garlinghouse said MoneyGram has partnered with Ripple to use XRP in its payment flows.

Garlinghouse acknowledged on CNBC there has been a lot of hype in the crypto space. He said the value of a token over the long term will be its utility, what problem is it solving?

"At Ripple we use XRP to settle liquidity issues between banks," he said on CNBC. The settlement takes place in three seconds.

On Fox Business, Garlinghouse said Ripple was working with American Express and other big money transfer companies.

Ripple XRP fell from a high of $3.84 to $2.21. On Fox, he said, XRP is part of an early stage of volatility.

“There is a lot of volatility in the digital asset market broadly, and certainly that is true in the bitcoin market, it’s been true for XRP and I think that’s because these markets are very nascent. This is still the earliest innings of the creation of what I think is really going to be a new asset category,” he told Fox.

Garlinghouse was recently inducted into the Topeka High School Hall of Fame. Garlinghouse said he has lived in California for 20 years, but he always thinks of himself as a Kansan first. “Topeka High is an indelible part of who I am today,” he said. You may read his comments at the Oct. 1, 2017 ceremony here.

Blogger Michael Hooper owns several crypto currencies including XRP.