Ripple CEO Calls Out Saylor — Says His Bitcoin Strategy Is Hurting The Crypto Market

Bitcoin (BTC) has had a rough bear market so far, with the leading crypto falling to its lowest level since September 2024 earlier this week. On Friday, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse sat down with CNBC and had plenty to say about it — backing BTC’s long-term outlook while taking direct aim at Strategy and its chairman, Michael Saylor. 

Ripple CEO Has A Problem With How Strategy Buys Bitcoin 

Garlinghouse argued that the long-term value of digital assets should be based on utility, rather than the kind of financial engineering that Strategy has used to fund its ongoing Bitcoin accumulation. As evidence, the Ripple executive pointed to STRC, Strategy’s perpetual preferred stock, which was trading around $74 at the time of his remarks. 

That placed it roughly 26% below its $100 par value — a meaningful discount for an instrument that carries an 11.5% annual cumulative dividend and has been used repeatedly by the company to raise capital for more Bitcoin purchases. In Garlinghouse’s view, that gap is not a market quirk. It is a signal that something about the approach is not working. 

In late May, Strategy sold 32 Bitcoin to fund STRC dividend payments — the first time the company had ever liquidated any of its holdings to service a financial obligation. Garlinghouse said that this approach has damaged the broader crypto market. Yet, the Ripple CEO was careful to distinguish his criticism of the strategy from his opinion of the asset itself. 

Overall, he remains bullish on Bitcoin, he said, and believes the current bearish environment — with the asset sitting more than 50% below its October 2025 all-time high — is exactly the kind of moment where investors should be leaning in rather than stepping back. 

He then compared Bitcoin to digital gold, highlighting how much easier it is to transfer value with Bitcoin than with the physical metal itself. He then moved on to discuss Ripple’s own position in the market.

Garlinghouse On XRP 

XRP, Garlinghouse explained, serves a different purpose. Its utility is focused on payments — specifically on leveraging the speed and efficiency of the XRP Ledger (XRPL)  for institutional use cases. 

He said Ripple has seen what he described as “tremendous demand,” pointing to $16 trillion in payments cleared through its prime brokerage business in 2025 alone, a figure he suggested has been driven in part through acquisitions: 

Ripple’s strategy from the beginning has been how to bring traditional finance into the modern architecture of blockchain. And now, through some acquisitions, we have a tremendous opportunity to bring that in.

At the time of writing, XRP was trading around $1.07, up 2.6% in the past 24 hours — a modest recovery that has so far kept the token above the psychologically significant $1 support level. Bitcoin was holding at $60,725, broadly unchanged from Friday’s earlier levels, according to CoinGecko data.

Featured image generated with OpenArt.