Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has once again called on the United States regulators to step up and “lean into digital currencies” as the nation is falling behind China in terms of crypto innovation.
Notably, China has continued with the development of its central bank digital currency, to the extent of conducting real-world pilot tests on the CBDC. As ZyCrypto previously reported, these trials will involve partners like McDonald’s, Subway, and Starbucks and will be carried out in four of China’s major cities.
The USA, on the other hand, has not even given clear guidelines regarding crypto regulation so far and has also put aside the development of a digital dollar. This goes to show that China is light years ahead of the US in the development of digital currencies.
Garlinghouse warns that this complacency will only set the US back while China gets all the glory.
Brad Garlinghouse’s Call To Action
As the trade tensions between the United States and China reach fever pitch, Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse is urging US regulators to look to digital currencies.
In a two-part Twitter thread on May 26, Garlinghouse shared an article entitled “Could China’s Digital Currency Unseat the Dollar?”. In recent months, China has accelerated its work on its central bank-issued digital currency. The digital yuan initiative has been in the works for over five years now, and it’s now getting closer to becoming a reality. This has led to many experts arguing that the days of the dollar as the world’s premier reserve currency are numbered unless the US accelerates similar initiatives.
While the US fails to assert its position as the global leader of innovation, Garlinghouse alludes that “China’s grip on both fiat and crypto payments becomes stronger”.
XRP Is Not Exempt From Regulatory Oversight
Garlinghouse has long been a strong advocate of regulatory clarity in the crypto space, especially for Ripple’s digital currency, XRP. In fact, Ripple was the first crypto-related company to open an office in Washington D.C in a bid to build closer ties with lawmakers.
Referencing the article, Garlinghouse posits that public digital currencies like XRP are not exempt from US or global financial oversight. Instead, the crypto-assets’ executives want to work together with regulators and not against them.
The Dollar Is Playing Catch Up
The dollar’s dominance is at risk of being thwarted with US policymakers failing to take any serious action to protect it at a time when China and Facebook are planning on replacing the existing financial infrastructure.
J. Christopher Giancarlo, the former Chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), is currently spearheading the digital dollar project. Speaking to Forbes last month, Giancarlo noted that although a digital dollar will have a myriad of use cases, the United States does not have to be the first superpower to introduce a digital currency. This is because the “dollar is currently so dominant that the U.S. has more to lose by rushing than it has to gain”.
As such, the US should take its time before rushing into developing a digital dollar as it carefully learns from the mistakes of others as well as from its own experiments. This implies that a digital dollar might not be coming anytime soon.
