Garlinghouse Owns Solana and Still Puts XRP in His Top Five

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in January he owns some Solana and is not an XRP maximalist. Clips of that hour-long talk spread on September 24 as if he had just turned on the token’s most loyal holders.

He also told friends to buy the top five coins by market cap and hold them five years. XRP was in that basket when the tape was cut, and it was still there in market tables dated September 26. The Solana line is real. The shock is late, and it misses what he said about dollar coins.

The Clip Came From a January Night in Miami

The remarks were not a new speech to staff, and they were not a filing. They come from a January conversation at Faena Forum titled “The Transformative Power of Crypto Assets,” logged by Faena Rose as a one-hour program on January 22, 2026. Garlinghouse sat with Sean McManus of M+D Advisors. The billed topics were cross-border payments, stablecoins, financial inclusion, and digital financial plumbing.

That is 245 days before the clip tore through X on September 24. Short excerpts, some running well over a minute, framed a winter conversation as breaking news. Garlinghouse has not posted a follow-up that changes the words. He also has not said how much Solana he still holds, if any, eight months later.

Asked why someone should pick XRP over Solana, he refused the tribal prompt. “What I honestly tell my close friends is I’m not here to convince you to buy XRP,” he said. Then came the line that sold the clip: he owns a little Solana, he is bullish on several coins for several reasons, and he is not an XRP maximalist.

Buy the Top Five and Hold Them Five Years

His retail advice was an index, not a sermon. “What I would tell you is buy the top five and hold them for the next five years and you’re going to do great,” he said. He did not name a custom list of favorites. He pointed at market cap.

Live tables compiled by Kanalcoin at 7:08 a.m. UTC on September 26 put that top five as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, BNB, and XRP. Solana sat seventh. The global crypto market cap in that snapshot was $2.89 trillion, down 2.34% over 24 hours.

TOP FIVE BY MARKET CAP, PLUS SOLANA

XRP’s 24-hour move in that table was +1.45%, with a seven-day gain of 8.48%. Solana was +3.54% on the day and +6.71% over seven days. USD Coin sat sixth at $75.43 billion, which is why Solana was seventh rather than sixth. Tether, a dollar token, is inside the five-year hold he said would treat a friend well. Holding USDT for five years is a bet on the peg, not on a moonshot.

XRP’s circulating supply in the same snapshot was 62.88 billion tokens. Solana’s was 587.71 million. Rank is size, not a score for payments, memes, or legal clarity. It is still the screen he told people to copy.

Why He Does Not Call Solana a Rival

The question that teed up the clip assumed a death match. Garlinghouse would not play. He said he does not consider Solana a competitor, that he is friendly with the people behind it, and that he will “root for Solana for sure.” He added that he thinks Solana will probably do well, and that he thinks XRP is going to do well.

I’m not one of these people who’s an XRP maximalist. I’m bullish on a bunch of cryptos, for a bunch of reasons.

Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, Faena Forum conversation

That split is easier to defend on product maps than on crypto Twitter. Solana is a general-purpose chain with cheap, fast blocks and a heavy retail trade. XRP’s long pitch is a bridge asset for moving value across currencies in seconds. Ripple’s own XRP page still says the token settles cross-border payments in 3+ seconds, with more than 4 billion transactions processed, more than 6.7 million wallets, and more than $1.7 trillion in value moved since 2012.

He even credited Solana’s meme-coin rush as a liquidity engine for that chain. In the same sitting he said he does not really get the meme-coin craze, and that a lot of what happens in crypto has been “net bad for crypto.” He put Bored Apes and the NFT boom in the same bin: he did not see how they created value. The SOL bag and the meme shrug can live in one head. They just make a poor cult slogan.

Ripple Already Pays Out on Solana Rails

The personal Solana line sounds sharper than the company’s plumbing. Ripple Payments already lets businesses settle in RLUSD, USDC, USDT or fiat, and the firm says that settlement layer is decoupled from any single issuer’s token. The same product page says the network reaches more than 60 markets, has processed more than $100 billion in payments volume, and sits inside a group holding more than 75 licenses worldwide, including a New York trust charter used for RLUSD.

Look at the payout table in Ripple’s own docs and Solana is not a rival logo. It is a rail. Payments Direct lists USDC payouts on the Solana network alongside other dollar-coin routes, with no country restriction on those digital-asset payouts.

DOLLAR COINS RIPPLE LISTS FOR PAYOUTS

• RLUSD on Ethereum: Ripple’s own dollar token, paid out on Ethereum for every listed business and consumer flow.
• USDC on Ethereum: Circle’s dollar token on Ethereum, marked live across the same B2B and B2C paths.
• USDC on Solana: the same USDC, sent on Solana, which is the quiet fact under the CEO’s “little bit of Solana” line.
• USDT on Ethereum: Tether on Ethereum, again listed as a global payout asset.
• USDT on Tron: Tether on Tron, the fifth listed stablecoin rail in that docs table.

A CEO who says he owns a little SOL is less of a plot twist once his payments stack is already pushing USDC across Solana. The tribal version of this week’s clip never gets to that page.

A Stablecoin Can Beat XRP on Some Payments

The Solana sentence was not the hardest one in the tape for people who treat XRP as the only bridge that should ever move a bank’s money. On cross-border flows, Garlinghouse gave a conditional nod, then took it back. “It could be that XRP is the best bridge asset for that purpose,” he said. He added that a stablecoin is going to solve that problem better in some cases.

That is how a vendor talks when the customer’s constraint is month-end cash, not token loyalty. A floating asset can still be the right bridge when a corridor is thin and you need to source liquidity on the fly. A dollar coin is simpler when the treasurer wants the balance to still read as a dollar tomorrow morning. Staff at the Federal Reserve have been writing through the same trade-off in research on stablecoins in cross-border payments, including speed, settlement risk, and what a pegged token does to the old correspondent-bank stack.

Ripple is on both sides of that fork. XRP remains the native asset of the XRP Ledger. The Ripple USD dollar-backed stablecoin is issued under New York and Dubai oversight, designed to stay at one dollar, and in some places wired straight into Ripple Payments. Kanalcoin’s September 26 table put RLUSD at $2.49 billion, rank 39, with $421.58 million in 24-hour volume. That is a payments product, not a replica of XRP’s float.

His test for any token was blunt. “I think any technology and any token, it has to have a real use case and it has to solve a problem, or I just kind of don’t get it,” he said. Applied to his own ticker, that test is why he would not say XRP wins every corridor.

Holders Heard a Betrayal in an Old Interview

The recirculation worked because XRP still has a church. For years the loudest holders have treated other large coins as enemies, and treated Ripple’s CEO as high priest. A sentence that begins “I’m not one of these people who’s an XRP maximalist” was always going to land as heresy in that room, even if it was filmed in January beside a discussion of stablecoins and inclusion.

The split that followed the clip was not really about a modest SOL bag. It was about whether Ripple can get paid when the cash leg is a dollar token. If a corridor settles in RLUSD, USDC, or USDT, the company can still earn on licenses, software, and float. The XRP buyer does not automatically get a bid. Partnership headlines that never name the settlement asset are easy to misread as token demand. They are not the same thing.

Some of the replies reached for identity instead of cash flow, including jokes about tattoos and loyalty tests. That is the tell. A payments chief who will not pick XRP over Solana on a talk-show prompt is talking like a vendor. The people who needed him to pick a jersey heard a dump. He also went out of his way to praise Coinbase and CEO Brian Armstrong, calling Coinbase one of the few large, consequential crypto companies in the United States, even while the two firms have fought in Washington over market-structure legislation.

XRP Still Sits Fifth in the Basket He Named

Strip the thumbnail language and the tape is consistent with how Ripple now sells. Use XRP when it is the better bridge. Use a dollar coin when the customer needs a peg. Hold a spread of large coins if you are a friend asking for a simple plan. Root for Solana. Do not run a maximalist shop from the CEO’s chair.

XRP was still fifth on September 26 at $1.55 and $97.51 billion. Solana was still seventh at $120.35 and $70.73 billion. He said both can do well. He did not say XRP was done, and he did not put Solana into the five-year top-five list he offered friends, because market cap did not put it there either.

The clip will keep travelling because it is short, it names Solana, and it punctures a purity test. The January date does not travel with it. The payout docs do not travel with it. What he actually offered was a basket, a utility test, and a small SOL line item. XRP remained inside the basket.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of public remarks, product pages, and market tables. It is informational only and is not investment, trading, or financial advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold XRP, Solana, Tether, RLUSD, or any other digital asset. Readers should consult a qualified financial adviser or licensed investment professional who can consider their own objectives and risk tolerance before acting. Prices, ranks, circulating supply, and product statuses are taken from the sources named in the piece as of the dates given there and can change without notice.