Garlinghouse’s company sells the software to banks to let them transact on blockchain, which means he spends a lot of his time reassuring people that the Silk Road days are over. Terms like “bitcoin” and “cryptocurrency” used to be linked with techno-anarchists who wanted an anonymous way to sell drugs and weapons on the internet, via online marketplaces like the Silk Road. So Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse was encouraged when regular people started speculating in tokens a few years ago. “That’s actually forward progress,” he said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher.