At Ripple Apex, the company’s flagship gathering for developers and partners, president Monica Long and chief executive Brad Garlinghouse took the stage for an unscripted fireside chat that quickly zeroed in on one of the industry’s most polarizing sub-sectors: meme coins. In an exchange that mingled candor with contrition, Garlinghouse acknowledged that his once-unyielding dismissal of Dogecoin no longer holds. The session began with the moderator’s binary provocation—meme coins, overrated or underrated?—to which Long replied that, taken at face value, many are “outright scams,” yet their speculative magnetism has nevertheless “miraculously become real functioning markets.” Long credited the phenomenon with seeding vital infrastructure—wallets, capital, developer mind-share—that she likened to Ethereum’s own 2016–2017 ICO surge. “There’s a lasting impact from meme coins,” she said.

The Ripple CEO offered what he called “the other side” of the argument. “I think meme coins are generally maybe grossly overrated,” he said, framing most of them as “not sustainable” projects that amplify regulatory skepticism. He contrasted that short-term gambling impulse with what he described as Ripple’s “long arcs of time” approach.

Yet the conversation turned when Garlinghouse revisited Dogecoin, a target of his past derision. “For people who have followed some of my public statements, I used to really speak not so kindly towards Dogecoin,” he admitted. “I was just like, Dogecoin? It literally was created as a lark… it is literally a pile of shit as the logo.”

His original objection, he explained, was that an asset conceived as parody could not credibly represent an industry courting institutional capital: “If we’re trying to engage institutions and build those bridges between traditional finance and decentralized finance… Dogecoin isn'output: 't representing us well.”

What changed his mind was not a newfound appreciation for the token’s fundamentals but the market reality forged by Elon Musk’s relentless advocacy. “Where I agree with Monica, and I think I got wrong, is Elon Musk willed Dogecoin into so much liquidity that it’s not going away,” the Ripple CEO conceded. “It’s part of the ecosystem. It plays a role.”

Even with that reversal, Garlinghouse made clear that most meme-coin launches remain “get-rich-quick rug pulls” that “reflect badly on those of us in the industry trying to build real products for real customers.” He cited US Senator Elizabeth Warren’s focus on negative use cases as a political example of how hype-driven projects can taint the wider field.

Pressed to nominate a single meme that captures crypto’s “chaos or brilliance,” Garlinghouse did not hesitate: “Doge. It is both the chaos and the brilliance.” Musk’s influence, he said, demonstrated how “liquidity begets liquidity,” underscoring the difficulty newcomers face in replicating Dogecoin’s network effects amid today’s “explosion” of imitators.

Long, for her part, maintained that even dubious tokens serve as experimental sandboxes that, over time, strengthen underlying blockchains. Garlinghouse ultimately stuck with his “overrated” verdict for meme coins as a category, yet his concession on Dogecoin—effectively elevating it from punchline to permanent fixture—marked a notable shift for the CEO of a company long positioned at the institutional end of the spectrum.

At press time, Dogecoin traded at $0.201.