For a while now, Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of San Francisco-based crypto payment company Ripple has been tweeting about the need for regulatory clarity. Garlinghouse revealed that he is considering moving Ripple’s headquarters to London over the lack of clear regulations with regard to cryptocurrencies in U.S. Garlinghouse especially considered relocating to the UK because the country’s regulatory watchdog, Financial Conduct Authority, offers clear taxonomy. He stated:
What you see in the U.K. is a clear taxonomy, and the U.K.’s FCA took a leadership role in characterizing how we should think about these different assets and their use cases. The outcome of that was clarity that XRP is not a security and is used as a currency. With that clarity, it would be advantageous for Ripple to operate in the U.K.
Ripple’s CEO had ‘shortlisted‘ certain countries and had considered moving his firm to Switzerland, Singapore, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. He added that “The U.S is out of sync with other G20 markets and how some of them think about these regulations”
Garlinghouse, who said he had been to London only last month, had earlier said that it was “unfortunate” that US regulators did not have a clear approach to cryptocurrencies, and re-emphasized the lack of a single national regulatory framework which was putting US companies, such as Ripple itself, at a disadvantage. To date, he has maintained that Ripple has been yearning for a “level playing field” and had been hinting at a possibility that Ripple could move out of the US, given its “lack” of a crypto regulatory framework.
