SAN FRANCISCO—Brad Garlinghouse, chief executive officer of crypto currency company Ripple, says he's worried Facebook's plans to enter the arena with its Libra digital coin will provoke harsher regulation of the entire sector.
"You just want to make sure that you don't get caught in the crossfire," Garlinghouse said in an interview with Fortune. "It is important to me that when regulators start asking questions that they don't lump us into one big bucket."
Garlinghouse said he was alarmed when U.S. President Donald Trump took to Twitter on July 11 and, in response to Facebook's decision to launch Libra, tweeted his opposition to cryptocurrencies, saying they could "facilitate unlawful behavior."
What Ripple Offers
Ripple offers financial institutions a way to make low-cost international payments and settle cross-border transactions using a digital coin called XRP. It says its payment processing platform, which is called RippleNet, is currently being used by more than 200 financial firms globally.
Garlinghouse told Forbes that last year "billions of dollars of transactions" were transmitted over Ripple's network, and that the number of transactions is doubling every quarter.