Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse and Michael Arrington to talk cryptocurrency at Disrupt SF

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Arrington XRP Capital founder (and TechCrunch founder) Michael Arrington will be joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September to talk money.

Garlinghouse has had a long and storied career in the tech industry, serving as a Senior Vice President at Yahoo!, President of Consumer Applications at AOL, and CEO of the file collaboration service Hightail. But in 2016, Garlinghouse was promoted from COO to CEO at payment services company Ripple.

Ripple’s goal is to try to make it as easy as possible to transfer money between two stores of value. Right now, that process is incredibly tedious, with no unifying structure to send money overseas or to underbanked communities. The notion of a unifying ledger is not a new one, but it’s one that’s transformed Ripple into a full-fledged company.

But Ripple also created the world’s third-largest digital token, XRP. The token has a current total market cap around $30 billion, and the company is working to expand the use cases for XRP, which has primarily been marketed as a tool for banks but has only attracted cross-border payment services.

As cryptocurrencies continue to evolve and gain mainstream attention, questions continue to mount around how these tokens will revolutionize the economy and gain utility.

TechCrunch founder and former Editor-In-Chief Michael Arrington will join Garlinghouse on stage to discuss the evolution of cryptocurrencies. Arrington left TechCrunch in 2011 and went on to start CrunchFund, which has invested in big name startups such as Uber, Airbnb, and Yammer.

In 2016, Arrington reduced his role at CrunchFund and has since started Arrington XRP Capital, a $100 million digital asset management firm in blockchain-based capital markets. Ripple is one of the first portfolio companies for Arrington XRP Capital.

This comes at a time when the SEC is doing everything it can to learn more about cryptocurrencies, sending out subpoenas to crypto funds far and wide, including Arrington XRP Capital.

This conversation is sure to be an interesting one, and one you won’t want to miss. Tickets to Disrupt SF (September 5 to September 7) are available now.

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