Ripple’s chief technology officer David “JoelKatz” Schwartz used the annual XRP Las Vegas gathering to acknowledge publicly, for the first time, that the company’s constellation of products now constitutes what can “be considered a financial system.” Yet even as he laid out an expansive vision of on-ledger banking functions, Schwartz conceded that the link between that system’s growth and the market value of XRP itself remains “very hard to do” and ultimately uncertain.
Ripple CTO Casts Doubt On XRP’s Price Destiny
The exchange that forced the admission began when independent reporter Vincent Scott asked the CTO whether Ripple’s three pillars — the RLUSD dollar-pegged stablecoin as unit of account, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) as permissionless payment rail and XRP as settlement asset or “gas” — could be read as a complete financial architecture. “Yes, you can consider those things a financial system,” Schwartz replied, shaking Scott’s hand before the latter recorded a confirmation video that quickly circulated on X.
Hours later the CTO elaborated on X: “I did say that you could consider the XRPL together with other things Ripple has built to be a financial system. I hope over the next few years it can provide a significant fraction of the financial services that people need every day, from payments to investments to loans.” That ambition rests in part on RLUSD, a dollar-pegged stablecoin whose public rollout began on December 17, 2024 and which is now live on both the Ripple’s native ledger and Ethereum.
Community discussion quickly pivoted to whether XRPL’s expanding palette of assets might dilute attention on token itself. Schwartz pushed back but conceded nuance: “The XRPL is more than just XRP. There are stablecoins, there will be tokenized real-world assets, loans of all kinds of things. A DEX doesn’t work with just one asset,” he wrote. “But XRP has a privileged place on XRPL. It’s the only asset that any account can receive. It’s the only asset without a counterparty. Pathfinding checks for XRP liquidity first. Autobridging makes offers to and from XRP more likely to be taken. It’s the only asset you can pay transaction fees with.”
That architectural primacy does not translate automatically into price appreciation, a point Schwartz emphasized in a second thread: “The question to ponder is how much value XRPL can generate and to what extent that can turn into XRP value. That’s very hard to do though. For example, it’s very hard to know how much of XRP’s value today comes from XRPL’s value.”
Market data underscore the ambiguity. XRP changed hands Friday at roughly $2.14, only marginally higher than a week earlier despite a flurry of bullish chart projections that target the $3 level and bullish news from the XRP Ledger ecosystem.
Ripple’s broader corporate maneuvers highlight where that future throughput may originate. In April the company agreed to buy multi-asset prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, a deal that will see the brokerage use RLUSD as collateral and route a slice of its $3 trillion in annual trading volume through XRPL once the acquisition closes. If that pipeline materializes, the ledger could handle an order of magnitude more value than it does today; whether that translates into sustained demand for XRP liquidity is, by Schwartz’s own assessment, still an open research problem.
For now, investors are left weighing two countervailing forces: an expanding ledger that aspires to replicate retail and wholesale banking functions on-chain, and a native currency whose value capture mechanism, though privileged, is not mathematically fixed. As Schwartz told attendees, “That’s very hard to do.” The market will decide whether the difficulty lies in modeling the relationship — or in realizing it.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.12.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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