What happened
Brad Garlinghouse, the chief executive of Ripple, publicly criticized an $11 billion physical gold transfer on Friday, saying it demonstrated that banks still move value 'like it is 1940. ' BeInCrypto reported the comments Friday morning. Garlinghouse did not name the counterparties to the gold shipment in the excerpted remarks, and the underlying transfer has not been confirmed by a bank or custodian at time of writing.
The Ripple CEO's post was framed as a challenge to legacy settlement rails, with the implicit pitch that tokenized assets and blockchain-based transfer would compress both time and cost. Ripple has spent the past year courting institutional custody clients and pushing RLUSD, the dollar stablecoin it launched, into payment corridors previously handled by SWIFT messaging and correspondent banking.
Why it matters
The comment isn't just a soundbite. Ripple's business case, and by extension the case for XRP as a settlement asset, rests on the argument that moving value across borders in 2026 is still slow, expensive, and paperwork-heavy. An $11 billion physical gold move, if the reporting holds, is a gift-wrapped talking point.
Central banks and sovereigns have repatriated gold in size since 2022, with the Bundesbank, the Reserve Bank of India, and several Middle Eastern central banks all shifting bullion home. Each of those moves involves insured air freight, armed transport, and multi-day settlement. Garlinghouse is drawing a direct line from that friction to the pitch for tokenized settlement.