Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says the United States is closer than it has ever been to a coherent federal framework for cryptocurrency, pointing to a string of 2026 regulatory moves as evidence that years of ad hoc enforcement are giving way to actual rulemaking.
"Rules written for a different era aren't good enough," Garlinghouse said. "Not for consumers. Not for business. Not for innovation." His comments follow his appearance at the CFTC's inaugural Innovation Advisory Committee meeting on August 20 in Washington, where he sat alongside executives from Coinbase, Uniswap Labs, BitGo, Nasdaq, CME Group and Cboe under the chairmanship of CFTC Chairman Michael Selig.
A Committee Built for the Moment
The Innovation Advisory Committee, which Selig launched specifically to advise the agency on the intersection of technology, law and finance, drew more than 30 members from across crypto, traditional finance and prediction markets for its first session. According to reporting on the meeting, discussion ranged across crypto asset regulation and artificial intelligence before turning to prediction markets, which generated the most heated debate of the day — a sign that the agency's mandate is expanding well beyond its traditional derivatives remit as digital-asset products multiply.
Garlinghouse's presence at the table marks a symbolic shift for Ripple, whose long-running legal fight with the SEC once made it the poster child for regulatory hostility toward the industry. He noted that "we had a federal judge write the sentence that XRP in and of itself is not a security," a reference to the 2023 ruling that reshaped how programmatic token sales are treated under US securities law.
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From Enforcement to Rulemaking
Garlinghouse traced the current momentum back to March 2026, when the SEC and CFTC jointly clarified how existing securities and commodities laws apply to different categories of crypto assets, and the SEC introduced a formal token taxonomy framework for the first time. That joint guidance followed years of the two agencies operating with little coordination, a gap that had left exchanges and issuers guessing which regulator — if either — had jurisdiction over a given token.
The CEO also revisited Ripple's own history of pushing for this outcome, referencing a July 2019 open letter to Congress that he co-authored with Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen calling for asset-specific digital asset regulation rather than forcing crypto into securities-law categories built for equities and bonds. Ripple currently holds 75 licenses globally, a footprint the company has used to argue that clear rules, not looser ones, are what allow crypto firms to scale.
Still a Work in Progress
Despite the optimism, the framework Garlinghouse is describing remains a patchwork of guidance documents and committee recommendations rather than enacted legislation. The Innovation Advisory Committee has no formal rulemaking power of its own, and the token taxonomy introduced in March still needs to be tested against the next wave of tokenized products — from prediction markets to tokenized equities — now pushing into the same regulatory gray zones that defined Ripple's own multi-year court battle.
