Ripple Clo rejects the narrative that all crypto is good for crime and corruption
Crypto’s latest media dust-up is missing the day-to-day reality of on-chain usage, Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty argued Thursday, saying recent mainstream pieces have celebrated a “crypto is a tool of crime and corruption” narrative while ignoring transparent ledgers and widespread adoption.
In his October 17 Post on xAlderoty called that framing “a convenient narrative, but a lazy and inaccurate one,” and tried to pivot the conversation around who is really using crypto and why. He wrote that digital assets are used by tens of millions of Americans for practical tasks – such as lending money, verifying ownership and developing new forms of commerce – and emphasized that these activities run on “transparent, traceable” blockchains.
In his view, “Crime does not thrive in plain sight,” and public railroads make it easier, not harder, to check flows. That transparency, he suggested, is the missing context when opinion pages lean on a crime-and-corruption lens.
Alderoty’s post presses the idea that the “real story” is the utility of quotidian, unfeeling edge cases. He frames crypto less as an imaginary playground and more as a toolkit that compresses settlement times, cuts out middlemen and creates audible records that ordinary people and small businesses can use.
The emphasis is squarely on the core users – “Everyday Americans” who save time and cut costs – rather than on a subset of bad actors. He also flagged the National Cryptocurrency Association as the place for telling user-level stories, saying that’s certainly the work being done there.
He did not deny the abuse that existed; Instead, he argues the crime-and-corruption-only picture misses how public ledgers work and how people use them. By stressing monitoring, he aims to undermine the premise that crypto uniquely enables corruption and remind readers that open systems allow repeated, and permanent analysis. The through line is simple: the narrative must trace back to the truth.
For readers less familiar with his broader campaign, Alderoty also serves as president of the National Cryptocurrency Association, a nonprofit launched on March 5 with a $50 million grant from Ripple to boost literacy and safe adoption through first-person explainers and stories. The Group’s Mandate – Surface User Experiences, Demystify how public ledgers work, and highlight practical use cases – mirror the themes in Thursday’s post.
As Coindesk reported.
That previous piece echoes the theme of Thursday’s post: Increase daily use on transparent rails and reinforce transparent rules to measure use cases.
