Brad Garlinghouse (브래드 갈링하우스), Ripple's chief executive, again highlighted XRP's distinguishing features as a design specialised for payments, fast processing speed and low costs.

According to blockchain media outlet The Crypto Basic on May 14, Garlinghouse said at the recent XRP Las Vegas 2026 event that the XRP Ledger, unlike other cryptocurrency networks, was built from the start to solve real-world payment problems.

Garlinghouse said those who built the XRP Ledger previously worked on Bitcoin's core technology and, based on that experience, designed a network focused on solving real payment problems. He said the XRP Ledger has focused on faster and more efficient payment processing rather than being a general-purpose network that covers all functions.

The background also aligns with that. The XRP Ledger launched in 2012 and was designed to reduce cross-border remittance problems such as slow processing and high costs in existing banking systems. Unlike Bitcoin's emphasis on storing value and Ethereum's focus on supporting various applications, the XRP Ledger focused on fast and cheap transfers.

He cited fast settlement and low fees as XRP's competitiveness. He said XRP Ledger transactions typically settle in 3 to 5 seconds, and the fee per transaction remains far below 1 cent.

A track record of large-scale processing was also presented as a strength. The XRP Ledger has processed more than 4 billion transactions to date, and Garlinghouse viewed this as an example proving scalability while maintaining speed and stability.

Published figures also largely match this explanation. The XRP Ledger generally completes transactions in 3 to 5 seconds, with costs typically kept below $0.01. In many cases, fees remained in the range of $0.0002 to $0.000856. Even when network congestion increased, fees stayed relatively stable and large-scale gridlock was rare.

Processing performance was also presented as key evidence. The XRP Ledger can process about 1,500 transactions per second in real-world conditions, and recently maintained throughput of more than 120 per second. Each batch contained about 600 to 700 transactions. Total transactions rose to about 4.28 billion as of early 2026, and daily transactions increased from about 1,000,000 to 1,200,000 in mid-2025 to 2,700,000 to 4,490,000 in March and April 2026.

Its long operating history was also highlighted. The XRP Ledger included a built-in exchange and token support features from the early days, and has built operational stability by closing more than 100 million ledgers to date.

Institutional use cases are also growing. Ripple conducted a pilot related to tokenised U.S. Treasuries (OUSG) earlier this month with JPMorgan's Kinexys, Mastercard and Ondo Finance. The blockchain segment of settlement for the transaction took less than 5 seconds, followed by a dollar payment. This confirmed the XRP Ledger is being tested as a settlement infrastructure for real-world financial assets beyond a simple remittance network.

Ecosystem expansion is also under way. Stablecoins such as RLUSD were added, and decentralised finance activity expanded. Automated market maker pools increased to close to 27,000.

The role of the community was also mentioned as one of XRP's strengths. Garlinghouse referred to XRP users as the "XRP family" and sometimes described them as the "XRP army." He said that considering speed, costs, scalability, community and long-term reliability together, XRP remains a system with room to grow.

As discussions on cryptocurrency regulation continue, the next point to watch is how much more the XRP Ledger can broaden real-world usability and points of contact with the institutional system as a payments-centred network.

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