A fresh clash between XRP critics and defenders broke out on X after Chainlink Community Liaison Zach Rynes (@ChainLinkGod) argued that the XRP investment thesis has failed to keep pace with how crypto markets and financial infrastructure have evolved. His central claim was blunt: the XRP Ledger is now a ‘ghost chain,’ while the use case once pitched for XRP as a bridge asset has largely been overtaken by stablecoins and broader interoperability infrastructure.
Rynes framed the dispute around what he called the long-running retail thesis behind XRP. “The bizarre retail thesis of XRP is that it will become the global reserve currency that everything trades against, the so-called ‘XRP standard,'” he wrote. “Rather than trading Dollars for Euros directly, you would trade USD for XRP, and then XRP for EUR, because this makes payments supposedly more efficient.”
He argued that XRP supporters prefer to describe this not as a bid for reserve-currency status, but as a narrower ‘bridge currency’ role. In his view, that distinction does not materially change the argument. He said the larger problem is that the market structure envisioned by early XRP advocates was built in other ways over the past decade.
Rynes elaborated, “The XRP vision was created over a decade ago before we had modern 200K TPS high-throughput chains, programmable smart contracts, DeFi protocols, fiat-backed stablecoins, tokenized deposits, atomic DvP/PvP swaps, and cross-chain infra.” He pointed out that if you listen to what the world’s largest financial institutions and market infrastructures such as Swift, DTCC, JP Morgan, BlackRock, and many others are saying, you’ll find zero of them talking about the need for a ‘bridge currency.’ Rather, they discuss the need for connectivity, interoperability, privacy, compliance, and orchestration.
That critique extended to XRP Ledger’s position in tokenization and on-chain finance. Rynes stated that the belief that XRPL “will become the dominant chain for tokenized real world assets” remains popular among XRP holders, despite weak adoption metrics. He called XRPL “a ghost chain with less than 1% RWA market share and under 0.01% of stablecoins,” arguing that this makes the idea of XRPL emerging as the primary settlement layer difficult to defend.
Rynes also pointed to stablecoins as the practical winner in the bridge-asset debate. He asserted that “USD-backed stablecoins have become the dominant crypto-native ‘bridge currency’ for payments, trading, and finance,” and noted that the industry has effectively built “everything XRP was supposed to be, without XRP.” As an illustration, he cited Hyperliquid, a case where positions across multiple markets are effectively denominated against dollar-backed stablecoins rather than XRP.
The second half of his argument shifted focus from ledger design to Ripple’s business model. Rynes alleged that Ripple “socializes its costs to XRP holders and privatizes gains for its equity shareholders,” saying XRP sales fund products whose revenue accrues to Ripple rather than directly to token holders. He also criticized RLUSD, indicating that around 90% of its supply resides on Ethereum and other chains, which creates little to no direct demand for XRP itself.
XRP Community Fires Back
Not everyone in the thread accepted that framing. XRP advocate and lawyer Bill Morgan pushed back on Rynes’ comparison between token buybacks and equity buybacks, calling it ‘a false equivalence because a token is nothing like a share and has no rights attached to it like a share.’ He also rejected the notion that Ripple and XRPL should be treated as one and the same, asserting that ‘Ripple does not own the XRPL, which is a fully decentralized public permissionless Blockchain.’
Morgan argued that Ripple had chosen a different structure through Evernorth, which he described as an independent vehicle designed to acquire XRP and offer institutions regulated exposure. He stated that this model is preferable to Ripple itself managing a reserve that could attract regulatory scrutiny, especially given the SEC’s previous attention to Ripple’s efforts to support XRP’s price in litigation.
At press time, XRP traded at $1.4757.
