At the recently concluded XRP Australia 2026 event, Ripple executives revived claims of a long-running negative campaign against XRP. CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the resistance was not imagined and was felt across the company's early years — an "invisible negative force" working behind the scenes.
Garlinghouse Acknowledges Larsen’s Long-Standing Warnings
Garlinghouse admitted that co-founder Chris Larsen had repeatedly claimed that Joey Ito, head of the MIT Media Lab, had something against XRP and Ripple. At the time, Garlinghouse treated those claims with caution. But after the recent release of the Epstein files and conversations about Ripple inside those documents, he now sees Larsen's concerns differently.
He noted that former SEC Chair Gary Gensler later became part of the MIT Media Lab environment, making those links more significant in hindsight. Garlinghouse said the reason behind the pressure was simple: "They were afraid of Ripple. The technology was ahead of its time and represented a threat."
President Long Describes a 'Mysterious Dark Cloud'
Ripple President Monica Long echoed that view, recalling the intensity of the backlash. She described an "absolute vitriol" toward the company, like a "mysterious dark cloud" hanging over Ripple. Executives could not clearly identify where the pressure was coming from or why the criticism was so persistent.
Together, the remarks paint a clear picture: Ripple's leadership now interprets its early battles around XRP not as random criticism, but as sustained resistance tied to what the company was building — a next-generation payment network that threatened incumbents.
Garlinghouse concluded that while some warnings seemed far-fetched at first, the evidence has shifted his view. The company has never stopped pushing forward with XRP, but the "invisible war" narrative now stands as one of Ripple's most explicit public descriptions of its formative years.