My friends, you're about to experience an expose where I'm going to show you the things that XDC Network does not want you to know. I see this as an investment that, in my experience, very likely is going to zero: extremely high risk, low potential reward, with much better investments available on the market today. I look at you as a neighbor. I've been in crypto 11 years, and I've researched thousands and thousands of altcoins. This one doesn't look good to me. That's why I'm not holding it, and I'm going to show you the research that supports that view. I bought this years ago, but then I did more research on it, at which point I sold it for things I believe are better, especially Internet Computer Protocol.
A market cap built on locked supply
If you look at XDC Network right now, according to CoinMarketCap, it sits in the top 100 cryptocurrencies and has a fully diluted market cap of $3.2 billion. To me, that means right now about half of the supply is set to get dumped on you. Half the supply is not even circulating, and I think that's terrible. I want to be in something like Bitcoin, where almost all the tokens are unlocked and the only new ones come from mining, or Ethereum, where the only new tokens come from staking. I don't want to hold something that has all these locked tokens dumping on me over time. In my experience, that is a recipe to get wrecked.
If you look at the price chart, it made its all-time high last bull market. Most coins, I've come to believe, don't have more than one bull market pump in them. It has had another pump recently, but that looks manipulated to me, and it looks useless. I'm going to go through the criticisms, because there are so many big, obvious problems.
First off, one of the biggest problems people point to right away is that this is not supported by major exchanges like Coinbase and Binance. You'll notice they're not on there. As big as this market cap is, it seems like they're not paying the money or playing the crypto matrix game the way most of these others are. My honest belief is that most cryptos only get to the top through lying, cheating, stealing, and paying people off. XDC doesn't even seem to be doing a good job at that, which would be fine if they had the best technology in crypto like Internet Computer Protocol does. But, in my view, they don't.
The technology versus what real-world assets actually require
Let's dive into the tech and what it can do. It's a blockchain developed to support trade finance and the tokenization of real-world assets. It's an EVM-compatible blockchain, and the claim that it uses a "state of the art" delegated proof of stake is, in my opinion, inaccurate. It is not state of the art. Internet Computer Protocol is state of the art, and everything else is just useless by comparison in my view. Here's the difference: when I say Internet Computer is state of the art, it does all this advanced work. All XDC can do is transactions, which is the same as everything else except ICP. ICP is the only crypto that, as I understand it, allows you to eliminate dependence on external hosting services. That's critically important when you're trying to be something built around real-world assets.
With real-world assets, it's critically important that you not have to rely on external hosting servers. Let's say you're doing a gold NFT. There's a gold project called GoldDAO that I'm holding a few hundred dollars of, not a huge amount, but I've got a few hundred dollars in it. It's a project on ICP. What they do is have gold bar NFTs and a gold stablecoin, and you can look at the project on golddao.org. This is a real-world asset project that relies on the Origin protocol on ICP to help it put everything fully on chain. By putting everything fully on chain with real-world assets, you can develop traceability, authentication, and certification. Origin chose to build their protocol on Internet Computer because of the infrastructure and what they describe as its advanced, unmatched technology.
With real-world assets, which is exactly what XDC says it's about, you need to have everything fully on chain, not on Amazon Web Services for the website and the database. If you have gold bars, like GoldDAO does, and you're trying to have gold NFTs, then you have to have all of that on chain for it to be secure and for it to actually be owned by the holders themselves. Otherwise, what you have is a situation where something like a Bybit hack remains possible, where you can't truly verify the authenticity of the real-world assets. If you host real-world asset details, things like gold bar serial numbers, on third-party Amazon hosting, you can't verify those are real, because that hosting could easily get modified, manipulated, or hacked. You could trick people, and you can't verify that it's secure.
So when I look at something like XDC Network, I see what it says it can do versus what I know it needs to do, based on the people at the cutting edge of real-world asset technology and crypto on Internet Computer. In my assessment, this cannot technologically do what really needs to be done, which is to put everything fully on chain. My conclusion is that this is going to go to zero. When people realize the best option for real-world assets is on Internet Computer Protocol, using a protocol like Origin that's already built to set it up, and then see a real example functioning fully today like GoldDAO, it becomes obvious. And that's very bad for XDC Network.
Transactions per second tell the story
Let's go through more obvious criticisms they don't want you to see. First, the transactions. Right now it's doing 8.7 transactions a second. How does that compare? We can find that out quickly. On chainspec.app/dashboard, you can see the fastest blockchains by transactions per second. ICP is number one, right up there with Solana. Then you have Stellar Lumens, which is in the very same kind of narratives that XDC is in, and it has ten times as many transactions a second. XDC would fall somewhere down low; it's not even tracked there. So XDC has a tiny amount of transactions a second right now, and it's getting dwarfed. It has a similar fully diluted market cap to ICP, but ICP right now has hundreds of times as many transactions a second as XDC Network. When you compare that with what I just said about the technology, that's a big problem.
The criticisms keep stacking up
It continues to get worse. Grok laid out some really nice criticisms that you can read through. I've gone over some of these already, like limited exchange support. As for partnerships, they have some, but partnerships are often easy to just pay for. You pay some company to say they have a partnership with you, and then you hardly deliver on it. So there are some partnerships, but I'm not impressed with them.
The complexity of the use case, to me, is a big problem for retail. What does retail know about an enterprise-grade solution tokenizing trade finance assets? That's so complicated for retail. But here's one of the biggest obvious things that everyone should be able to understand: competition from established players. XDC faces stiff competition from other blockchain networks targeting similar use cases, such as Ripple and Stellar. I'm not sure Ethereum is really quite appropriate for this comparison, but those two absolutely are. Almost all the hype around XDC is around what I've always seen as a BS narrative: this ISO 20022 compliance. DFINITY has the largest research and development team in blockchain behind Internet Computer Protocol. They have some of the best knowledge of what's needed technologically, and they don't see this as hardly worth doing anything for. Even if you think that narrative is relevant, XRP and XLM already have it covered. Those projects, if you're in that narrative, have much larger communities, more developer activity, and greater brand recognition. So what's the point of having XDC?
Then there are the centralization concerns Grok mentions, where you have to have master nodes, which I'm not a big fan of, and KYC requirements for validators. All the while, you can't even do all of this stuff on chain. As I said, the real-world impact here is almost zero that I can see. People have accused it of being a pump and dump. If you look at the price chart, it had a huge pump from way less than a cent all the way up to 18 cents, and then it just drained everything down to two cents. What looks to me like manipulated hype is going right back down quickly.
What their own channels reveal
I see more problems. Look at what they're talking about on their X account: bridging Web2 and Web3. What I know is that the best tech in the world for doing that is Internet Computer Protocol. They're talking about things ICP has already done, like account abstraction. When the cutting edge of what you're doing is something ICP solved a while ago, that tells me something. ICP has already solved the challenges real Web2 users face when adopting Web3: you go straight to the blockchain, you're not going through a third party. When you use something like OpenChat, you go straight into the blockchain right now. You don't have to pay any gas to use it. That has removed the main friction people experience all across the move from Web2 to Web3.
So you can tell from their X account that they're not on the cutting edge of the tech in crypto. They're also not on the cutting edge of paying people off, market cap, and exchange manipulation. They're not on the cutting edge of lying and cheating, and they're not on the cutting edge in technology, which to me is a really bad space to be in. Either pick one or the other. XDC is in this no man's land of not doing anything well.
Look at the YouTube channel. It has nine videos on it. I make nine videos in a day and a half because I have six YouTube channels and I'm a full-time YouTuber. Their whole channel has nine videos, and the last one was a year ago, a sign that the project isn't as active. Now let's go to the developer forums. If you look at the XDC Network forums, there are shocking levels of inactivity. The last post was 10 days ago. Then on XDC.dev, there's almost hardly any activity. I sorted by latest: one comment here, this one's a draft, this one has a decent amount of comments, the next post has one comment posted more than a week ago, the next had a recent comment, this one has a single comment. Look how inactive it is.
Now let me show you a project with a similar market cap. Look at how active the Internet Computer forums are. Here's one posted two hours ago. Look at all these posts within the last 24 hours, this whole row, tons of active conversations, lots of people interacting. This is one of the most active developer forums in all of crypto, and the fully diluted market cap is about the same as XDC. So either XDC is drastically overvalued, ICP is drastically undervalued, or both.
I talk about ICP a lot because the truth is I'm holding 5,000 ICP, and it's also, to me, the best thing in crypto. The best way to review a crypto and expose it is to compare it to the best. And I'm talking about the best technology, not the biggest wallet, or who paid the most people off, or who manipulated the metrics the most. I'm talking about the best tech, because ultimately, someday the tech is really going to matter in crypto. All the money stuff is just going to fall away and go to zero. That's what happens every bear market. So XDC, to me, is not well positioned for another bear market, and I don't see any reason to hold it today. My hope is that explaining this gives you some of the best research anyone has shown you about XDC Network. If you want to go deeper into how I think about valuing and holding crypto for the long term, you can explore my Money playlist.