The latest cryptocurrency media fight overlooks the everyday reality of on-chain usage, Ripple chief legal officer Stuart Alderoty argued on Thursday, saying recent articles have celebrated a narrative that “cryptocurrencies are a tool of crime and corruption” while ignoring transparent ledgers and their widespread adoption.
In his Oct. 17 post on He wrote that tens of millions of Americans use digital assets for practical tasks, such as lending money, proving ownership, and creating new forms of commerce, and emphasized that these activities run on “transparent and traceable” blockchains.
In his opinion, “crime does not thrive in plain sight,” and public rails make it easier, not harder, to scrutinize flows. That transparency, he suggested, is the context that is missing when opinion pages rely on a lens that prioritizes crime and corruption.
Alderoty’s post insisted on the idea that the “real story” is everyday utility, not sensational extreme cases. He framed cryptocurrencies less as a speculative playground and more as a set of tools that compresses settlement times, reduces middlemen, and creates auditable records that everyday people and small businesses can use.
The emphasis was squarely on core users – “ordinary Americans” who save time and reduce costs – rather than a subset of bad actors. He also pointed to the National Cryptocurrency Association as the place to tell those stories at the user level, saying that’s precisely the work being done there.
He did not deny that abuses exist; Instead, he argued that depictions that focus solely on crime and corruption overlook how public ledgers work and how people actually use them. By emphasizing traceability, he aimed to undermine the premise that cryptocurrencies uniquely enable corruption and remind readers that open systems allow for persistent and permanent review. The goal was simple: the narrative should reach reality.
For readers less familiar with his broader campaign, Alderoty also serves as president of the National Cryptocurrency Association, a nonprofit organization launched on March 5 with a $50 million grant from Ripple to boost literacy and safe adoption through first-person explanations and stories. The group’s mandate—exposing user experiences, demystifying how public ledgers work, and highlighting practical use cases—reflects the themes of Thursday’s post.
As CoinDesk reported, in a Sept. 29 op-ed, it framed crypto participation as mainstream and urged policymakers to “finish the job on crypto clarity,” arguing that predictable guardrails would protect consumers and give responsible businesses certainty to build in the country.
That article above reflects the theme of Thursday’s post: elevating everyday use on transparent rails and solidifying clear rules so those use cases can scale.
