Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse used the Dutch central bank’s gold reshuffle as a case study in how slowly official finance still travels. De Nederlandsche Bank spent March through August shifting 86 tonnes of gold — about $11 billion in Garlinghouse’s telling, roughly €10 billion on DNB’s own year-end math — out of New York and Ottawa toward London.
Sponsored
The point was not that gold is obsolete. It was that moving a crisis reserve still takes months, vaults, and a paper trail that would look familiar in the 1940s.
Most Of The “Move” Never Left The Ground
DNB said the transfer was about crisis preparedness and making reserves easier to sell in London, the world’s main physical-gold market. Only part of it was bars on a plane. About 59 of the 86 tonnes were sold in New York and bought back in London.
Brad Garlinghouse put that share at roughly 70%. Another 27 tonnes went physically via the Netherlands so bars would not have to be melted.
After the shuffle, London holds about 32% of Dutch gold, the Netherlands about 31%, and New York and Ottawa about 18.5% each. DNB Governor Olaf Sleijpen said the bank assumes it will never need to deploy the metal — and still felt it had to improve how fast it could.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse lined that up with Germany’s 2013 repatriation: 674 tonnes, $36 billion then, and four years to pull metal out of Paris and New York.
Crypto Just Scaled. The Plumbing Didn’t.
In the decade between those two gold stories, Brad argued, crypto went from a $1.5 billion experiment to a $2.7 trillion asset class with real liquidity. Cars drive themselves, AI rewrote office work, Starlink put the internet in the middle of nowhere. Official value still often moves by relocating bars or booking a sale in one vault and a purchase in another.
That is the use case he is selling: store value, then move it instantly, with low cost, without a multi-month logistics program. He followed the post by pointing to the Bank for International Settlements testing on the XRP Ledger — low fees, fast settlement, a live track record — and to tokenized gold already being issued on XRPL, including Meld Gold’s gram-backed tokens.
None of that replaces a central bank’s need for allocated metal in a crisis. It does highlight the gap DNB just advertised: even a “move” of $10 billion-plus is still part physical, part accounting, and slow on purpose.
Ripple CEO’s argument is based on infrastructure, not a price target. If official institutions want transferable reserves that settle in seconds, rails like XRPL are the pitch. If they want bars they can touch in London, the trucks and the book-entry swap stay. Both can be true. Only one of them still takes half a year.
Check out DailyCoin’s popular crypto news today:
Coinbase Grabs XRP Rich-List Bronze After 5.5B Relabel
Ethereum’s $3K Breakout Has This One Gatekeeper