Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the company’s long-standing focus on connecting traditional finance with decentralized finance, once viewed skeptically within the crypto industry, has become one of Ripple’s core strengths as institutional adoption reshapes the sector.

From Controversial Bet to Industry Consensus

Garlinghouse said Ripple was “somewhat controversially” focused from early on on building a bridge between traditional financial systems and decentralized finance, a positioning he said was initially viewed as a negative within the crypto industry itself. He attributed that early skepticism to purists who believed the entire financial system needed to move fully on-chain to be legitimate.

He pushed back on that view…