There’s more to the Brad Garlinghouse-Cynthia Lummis feud
A multi-year war between XRP promoters and Bitcoin maximalists has boiled over into another public fight between Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Senator Cynthia Lummis, chair of the Senate’s Digital Assets Subcommittee.
Yesterday, Garlinghouse admitted that Lummis canceled and refused to reschedule their meeting in Washington, DC.
Garlinghouse was on Capitol Hill to advocate for XRP-friendly stablecoins and market structure bills. Lummis, on the other hand, prefers bitcoin (BTC) and other stablecoins that compete with Ripple’s RLUSD.
The incident wasn’t merely a logistical hiccup. Underlying ideological and financial tensions have famously divided the Ripple and Bitcoin communities for years.
Garlinghouse decided to take Lummis’ cancellation public, earning over 1.6 million impressions for his claim of disappointment. Lummis, for her part, hasn’t even bothered to respond publicly.
One pro-XRP lawyer commented on the cancellation, “Some of her comments put her alongside some of the worst Bitcoin maxis around.” He also blamed her for creating an unfair playing field in government because “she is a champion of bitcoin exceptionalism.”
Read more: Ripple went all-in on politics and gained billions
Ripple versus the maxis
Bitcoin exceptionalism or maximalism is the belief that BTC is superior and should displace other crypto assets, including XRP. Maximalists have a particular grudge against Ripple that has been building for years.
Indeed, Lummis has positioned herself as a BTC champion, advocating for a failed Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) bill that would have legislated the US government’s purchase of 1 million BTC.
Although not a strict BTC maximalist, she often cozies up to maximalists and speaks to maximalist audiences on a regular basis.
Moreover, Lummis’ son-in-law, Will Cole, has supported maximalist views and criticized Ripple’s founders. He has called XRP a “centralized joke” and has blamed Ripple since 2021 for conducting “a massive premine with founders greedier than any central bank.”
Although there’s no proof that Lummis shares her son-in-law’s views, the public criticism from Cole, Lummis’ well-publicized alliances with Bitcoiners, plus her personal disclosures about investing in BTC certainly open the door to a potential bias in her treatment of Garlinghouse.
In the past few years, XRP tokenholders have been focusing on politics and making billions in the process. Garlinghouse, like many other XRP fans, is actively using Capitol Hill to his advantage.
By taking his spat with Lummis public and inviting criticism of her potential anti-XRP bias, he’s continuing the lobbying campaign that has coincided with the price of XRP rallying fivefold in the past three years.
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