A couple of years ago, I held XRP until I saw the information I'm about to show you today. This is a very serious post for XRP holders, because I want to walk through the facts, F-A-C-T-S, facts that you need to look at. Anyone can do this research, and everything I'm showing you is publicly available. All the XRP hype videos never mention this, and you can verify it for yourself in about five minutes.
So let's start with the price right now. As I'm writing this, it's at all-time highs, which in my experience is probably a good time to take profits. Now, some of you I've talked to think that XRP is Ripple flipping the switch, that the whole financial system is about to start shooting its load in XRP across the globe. I believe that's wrong. Show me any evidence of that. I went through all the XRP hype and speculation videos, and as far as I can tell everybody is literally just talking and making stuff up. When I bought XRP a couple of years ago, I bought into that exact narrative, because that's what they were doing then too. They're still using the same narratives, and they just keep pushing the timelines back and back.
Look at the ledger data yourself
Let me show you the research I think you need to do yourself to look at the truth. Go look at the xrpscan.com data. This will show you how much the ledger itself is actually getting used. Click on metrics on xrpscan.com. Now look at the number of payments from one account to another. You can see how a year ago they were a lot higher than they are today. Look at today, when the price is $3, when there's all kinds of hype, when supposedly they're flipping the switch and it's going off. A year ago, the payments were higher. I'd say that's a bad sign, but it gets worse.
Click on "all." Yes, there was a spike about a year ago, but it was temporary. What you'll notice is a shockingly small amount of growth on this ledger. A shockingly small amount of growth. For most of 2024, there are barely a few hundred thousand payments a day across most of this ledger. And if you look at the all-time view, the payments where they are today are not that much higher than they were years ago.
And that's just the payment count. If you scroll down, you can look at the payment volume from one account to another, and there is literally no increase at all in payment volume over the last year. None. It's flat, absolutely flat. That's bad if you're trying to argue this is some amazing thing that's blowing up.
Now, you have had some hype recently around the number of active accounts sending payments. But look at the whole history of this thing, which unfortunately only goes back to 2022 here. You can see that for years, the actual number of payments and active accounts has been going down. There's always a spike whenever there's a temporary, manipulated pump, which to me looks like Ripple buying a bunch of the token all at once to push the price, or a court case win, or something like that. But then it dies off. Whatever everybody is hyping about doesn't materialize. Right before all this artificial, manipulated hype got going, the fact is the growth was going down, down, down. There was nothing happening in the background. It was dwindling away. And then you get a manipulated price pump.
The bots are real
People change money around and make stuff up. In my experience, XRP uses bots. Someone holding XRP pushes videos with bots, and I have proof of that, because I made a video two years ago hyping XRP, and I have never seen as many bots push one of my videos. I would guarantee you the same thing is still happening today. What the data indicates is that nothing much has actually happened. This is an old blockchain, and the growth is terrible.
If you look back, the fees now are very comparable to years ago. The number of transactions executed has not gone anywhere in a year. Look at the number of new accounts activated. Yes, recently there's been some new accounts activated, but look at the whole year: you're lucky to get a thousand new accounts a day. Things do not change overnight. If you look at the data, the data looks horrible for XRP. But it gets worse.
The developer numbers are damning
Let me give you an example. One of the recent XRP pumper videos cited a tweet where XRP was listed as a "zombie chain" by Forbes. The guy commented on there saying they're bringing thousands and thousands of new developers to the XRP ledger. Where is the proof of that? Let's go check the data.
First, let's compare it to Internet Computer Protocol. Here's the blockchain ranking sorted by fee growth between the first and second half of 2024, so six months of 2024. Internet Computer is up 37 times. Where's XRP on this list? Do you see XRP at all in fee growth? No. Stellar is up there with comparable growth to Solana, but XRP is not on this list at all.
If you want to look behind the scenes of that guy's tweet, look at the top developer ecosystems from the Electric Capital report, which is the most respected developer report in crypto. Right now, the top three ecosystems are Ethereum and Solana by continent, but ICP sneaks up there in Africa, despite the work Cardano supposedly did. XRP, despite having a market cap close to Solana, is not a top-three ecosystem on any continent right now. But it gets worse than that.
If you look at who grew the fastest by full-time developers, Internet Computer is up 62%, only behind EigenLayer, which is tiny and which I haven't even heard much about. Is XRP on that list? No. But it gets even worse. In the developer capital report, while Solana is mentioned as number one for new developers relative to market cap, Internet Computer Protocol actually got the most new developers per market cap. How many more did it get than XRP per market cap? I made a little slide showing this in my XRP presentation. First, the raw data: 178 new developers on XRP in 2024.
I've come to believe that those of you who are into XRP are in an absolute delusion if you think it's just going to blow up overnight when it hasn't done that in a decade. Yes, it's had bull runs like some of these other cryptos, where it pumped from 25 cents to $3, but notice it took almost eight years, seven or eight years, to get back to its all-time price in US dollars. And the price of Bitcoin was much lower back then, so XRP hasn't even gotten close to its all-time high when measured in Bitcoin.
If you compare by market cap, XRP is close to Solana. But Solana got roughly a hundred times as many developers as XRP per market cap, and Solana sits a bit lower than Internet Computer. When I ran the numbers, Internet Computer got 500 times as many new developers compared to its market cap. XRP, per billion dollars of market cap, got less than one new developer. That is horrible. To me that clearly means no one is building on this. Solana got around 7,000 new developers, and it had a lower market cap when I calculated that than it does today. XRP got 178. Come on. That's like 40 or 50 times fewer. Solana got 40 or 50 times as many new developers as XRP. That is horrible.
Real-time transactions barely register
It continues to get worse. Go look at the fastest blockchains by transactions. Solana is close to XRP in market cap, but it's second to ICP in real-time transactions. Then scroll down. Where's XRP on this list? Where's XRP in real-time transactions on the network? Scroll down to 50. Is it even on here? Did I scroll past it? XRP, where is it? It's hardly doing anything. You've got Stellar up there at 121 transactions a second, along with Polygon, Ethereum, Hedera, Bitcoin, MultiversX. XRP's transactions are so non-existent that it doesn't even look like they've added it on ChainSpect. That's how irrelevant XRP is in the crypto world in terms of real people using the chain.
Now, in terms of bots pushing videos, narratives, and people getting paid off to say things that don't materialize, yeah, XRP is doing great. But the fact is, if you look at the data, the XRP ledger metrics look horrible. For all the recent price hype we've seen, you're telling me the payments are lower? The fact is the payments are lower. Today, with all the hype, all the videos, all the lying, all the speculation, the fact is the payments are lower than they were a year ago, and the growth is non-existent, except for some people hearing about XRP and signing up for some new accounts in relatively small amounts.
What I believe you need to know
So this is critical XRP information I think you need to know, because so many of you have only two altcoins in your portfolio, XRP and ICP, and I want you to look honestly at the difference. Yes, in the short term, the XRP price did pump. In my opinion, now is the time to exit. And finally, look at the fully diluted market cap. XRP has one of the largest token holdings out there, and Ripple still has over $100 billion to potentially dump on all the people buying this. In my view, it's an absolutely horrible, one-star, terrible crypto investment. If you want to see how I think through crypto and other money decisions, you can browse my Money playlist, and remember that none of this is financial advice, just my own experience and beliefs.