April 21, 2022: -Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are held back due to the entire $2 trillion market, according to the CEO of Ripple.

“Polarization isn’t healthy in my judgment,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in a CNBC-hosted fireside chat at Paris Blockchain Week Summit.

“I own bitcoin, and I own ether. I own a few others. I am an absolute believer that this industry will continue to thrive.” “All boats can increase,” Garlinghouse added.

Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo executive, compares the crypto industry today to the dot-com era of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“Yahoo could be successful, and so could eBay. They are solving different problems,” he said. “There’s different use cases and the other audiences and different markets. I think a lot of those parallels exist today,” he added.

There are many cryptocurrencies in circulation, worth $2 trillion altogether, according to CoinGecko data.

Few digital coins have attracted quite a dedicated following, not least bitcoin, whose hardcore advocates are referred to as “maximalists.”

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor are maximalists who favor bitcoin and not other cryptocurrencies.

Garlinghouse said that the maximalism has meant the crypto industry has “fractured representation” when lobbying U.S. lawmakers.

In the previous month, President Joe Biden signed an executive order calling on the government to examine the pros and cons of cryptocurrencies.

“The lack of coordination in Washington, D.C., amongst the crypto industry, I find to be shocking,” he said.

Ripple is often linked with XRP, the company’s cryptocurrency, for cross-border payments.

The company owns most of the 100 billion XRP tokens in circulation, which it releases from an escrow account to keep prices stable.

Currently, Ripple is in court with the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the allegations that it sold $1 billion worth of XRP illegally in an unregistered securities offering. The company argues that XRP should be considered a virtual currency, not security.