You are about to experience the most brutal, data-based roast of XRP you have ever seen. And it is because I love you. I want you to be a successful crypto investor. I have held XRP before. I bought into the hype narratives, and now I have seen through them. In my experience, XRP looks absolutely hopeless, and I invite you to have some curiosity, to wonder what I could possibly mean with my title. XRP has this $69 billion valuation and only actually makes $360 a day in chain fees. It is crazy.
I know you are tired of the usual presentation that every single XRP holder gets, the one that promises this will change your life. I hope to pop the bubble of delusion. I want you to know what I believe is the truth. Here is the truth as I see it: $69 billion of hype, and the actual revenue the chain makes is $360 a day in fees. How many of you make $360 a day? By that logic you should be worth $69 billion too. I should be worth billions of dollars as well.
I used to hold this token. I bought into the ISO 20022 hype. I bought into people giving shallow narratives based on almost nothing. Once you see this, you will never be able to unsee it, and you will be grateful I showed you this information. You can confirm all of this. Look it all up yourself. It is easier than ever today.
Here is the truth I believe you can handle. XRP is priced like it is going to become essential global financial plumbing. That is the market cap. But the actual XRP Ledger economic activity is microscopic. I try to throw some laughs in too, because crypto content can be so boring. Let us have some fun while we go through this.
The economic activity is microscopic next to the token's market cap, and Ripple's business grows without forcing XRP demand. In my view this destroys every single XRP hype video. Stablecoins are the cleaner, more institutional option. Ripple's business of putting these stablecoins out can actually sabotage XRP. There is no version of the data, nothing you can spin, to make the current price even reasonable, let alone higher. The only reason the price is anywhere near where it is today is financial engineering, and people having no clue what they are buying while they watch influencers tell them to put $500 in XRP and they will be set for life. In my opinion that is absolutely ridiculous.
Does anyone realize how much XRP Ripple still has to potentially sell into the market? Most XRP holders have never seen even a fraction of this information before. The worst part is that Ripple, the company, can actually win while XRP holders go to zero. Now, I am not neutral at all. I cannot stand all these fake altcoins that, in my view, are tricking you and my friends and my family into putting money into them and then ripping you off. I do this because I love you and I care about you and I want you to have the best information. I would rather tell you the truth than tell you what you want to hear, especially when you do not want to hear it.
The truth about XRP, as I see it, is that even if Ripple and all the hype about Ripple succeeds, please show me where having XRP in your wallet captures any of that value. We are going to look through 14 massive problems. I have been repetitive talking about ICP, and I have a dedicated Jerry Banfield ICP channel, so I am not even going to lean on the bigger elephant in the room, that ICP is likely to make the rest of altcoins irrelevant with its technology. There is so much I can point to on XRP without even doing that. I am an ICP maxi, and this is not financial advice. This is why I do not hold XRP and, in my experience, would never consider it.
Some people say XRP and ICP are both amazing. In my view they are absolute opposites. ICP is the best tech in crypto. It is valued at something like 50 times less than XRP. XRP, to me, is one of the worst junk coins in all of crypto with almost no real value. To think the two are similar is exactly the belief I want to break here. It is insanity, in my opinion, to think XRP is amazing. So you need to know what you are buying.
Three Different Things Share One Narrative
This is the outline of what you can expect. I know how the hype works from the inside. It is mind control, empty promises, and hype that do not stand up to any real research. Know what you are buying. Three different things share one narrative, and this is a problem. Every argument I make here starts from the gap between all these narratives and the truth.
First, if you are holding XRP, you are holding the XRP token. This is a digital asset trading around $69 billion in market cap, with a $111 billion fully diluted valuation. Ripple still has, in my understanding, over $50 billion of the token they can sell. That token overhang and the value of the blockchain together make this, in my opinion, one of the worst situations for crypto retail out of everything. The retail holders hold a token with massive token overhang. This is the opposite of ICP. It is the opposite setup of ICP, completely.
Second, there is XRP the Ledger, or XRPL. The XRP Ledger is a fast, cheap, payments-focused blockchain running since 2012, with a native DEX, issued assets, escrow, and a tiny fee that is burned instead of paid out as validator rewards. It cannot run everything on chain.
Third, there is Ripple, the company. A private fintech company building payments, custody, stablecoins, prime brokerage, treasury, and tokenization products. This is a privately owned US company. This is not XRP the token. These are very different entities, and this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem. We are going to talk about how Ripple's RLUSD is actually, in my view, a huge liability for XRP holders, not a reason for any of this to pump.
How many XRP holders can actually explain the difference between holding the token, having zero equity in Ripple the company, and the XRP Ledger having almost no activity and revenue on it, which is all you can capture with the token?
The Number That Should Make You Nauseous
Here is the worst data point, the one that should make you nauseous if you are an XRP holder. The $69 billion valuation is being priced like it is a major, major thing. The truth is $360 in chain fees a day. If you include fully diluted, which I believe you should, you are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in valuation against hundreds of thousands of dollars in actual annual revenue. That is far off. There is nothing I have found in crypto this extreme. I made Solana look bad the day before. I said Cardano is dead. This is so much worse than either of those.
The market cap is roughly 526,000 times the chain fees. This is the number serious investors use to judge whether something is anywhere near a real investment, whether it has a real business system. Do you see how far off this is? Only 40,000 active addresses. Only 1.6 million daily transactions. This is the exact opposite of ICP in every single way. To me this is a clear exit sign.
Ideally, that ratio should be 10, maybe a maximum of 100, unless there is some outlier like ICP where the technology could cause fees to blow up. There is, in my view, no scenario where XRP fees blow up. So the math does not work. The fully diluted valuation is around 845,000 times the fees. As soon as you see this, in my opinion, you should feel like you need to get out before other people figure it out. This is extreme danger.
People say XRP is a North Star. It may be a North Star for Ripple, but not for the holders. XRP bulls talk like XRP is essential global liquidity infrastructure. Meanwhile, the ledger is barely doing anything. Regular people who are not holding XRP can see the obvious things like this from a mile away. But once you have drunk the Kool-Aid, you first have to admit, oh, I was wrong, somebody lied to me and I believed it. Then you can forgive yourself. I did the same thing. Some guy sent me an email years ago talking about XRP and ISO 20022, and the price was about the same as it is right now. When I bought XRP four years ago, the price was the same as now. The XRP Ledger data was almost the same. Even though the court case was won, even though four years have passed, it is the same shit, different day.
A Burn You Need a Microscope to See
This burn, you need a microscope to see it, and that is why it is so bad. The XRP documentation shows every transaction destroys a small amount, but it is actually cheaper to do an ICP transaction than an XRP transaction. So this is not the bull's excuse that it is so cheap they are not making revenue. ICP is cheaper than this, and off the top of my head from the day before, I believe Solana is cheaper than this as well. The burn is $360 a day. It only burns a few hundred dollars. Where is the token value going to come from for XRP holders? That is the question you have to sit with. Where exactly is the token value going to come from?
In my opinion, right now it is nothing more than a Ponzi-like dynamic where only people who have no idea about this are buying it. It is going to take only a relatively small share of XRP holders to realize this and dump their whole XRP portfolio. What happens when somebody holding a million dollars in XRP sees this and sells? What happens when somebody with $10 million in XRP sees it and sells all of it? What happens when there is a cascading effect where people accept that this is the truth? These are verifiable on-chain data. Everything else, in my view, is built on numbers that do not add up.
So take this in. I know that when you are holding XRP and you have watched people repeat the same thing over and over, this can be hard to hear. But a lot of the things that have been hardest for me to hear have been the most important. Everybody told me I was an alcoholic and needed to stop drinking. I did not want to hear it when they told me, and I am so glad they did. After everybody told me, I finally did anything to get sober. I try to be the person today who has the courage to tell people what they do not want to hear, because that is often where the biggest opportunities are.
The Value Capture Problem
Number three is the value capture problem. XRP does not have Solana's inflation disease. It has the opposite condition, and I would argue it is worse. In my experience, many YouTubers are effectively paid promoters or are just doing anything to get views. On YouTube, if you tell people what they want to hear, it is easier to get views. If I just made a video telling you how great XRP was based on shallow points, it would honestly be much easier for me to get views. On top of that, I personally observed what looked like bots. I actually made XRP hype videos three years ago when I had not done my own research, and it looked like a bunch of bots pushed those videos. That is an even worse sign.
The bulls will say there is no inflation, but I do not think that is true, because Ripple is holding something like $50 billion of XRP that gets unlocked and given to them. I would call that inflation. Yes, there is a fixed maximum supply, no block rewards, and no staking rewards, but Ripple has most of it and gets to do whatever they want with it. On the other side, there is no meaningful cash flow to validators, stakeholders, or treasury.
Right now, in my view, there is no incentive to participate in this ecosystem. There is no reason to run a validator. There is no reason to hold the token unless you believe other people will do less research than you and buy it, and that somehow the price goes up, and that somehow more people buy the token than Ripple sells. The network barely pays anyone, barely burns anything, and barely captures any value for holders. If the network does not pay its holders, does not pay its validators, and burns almost nothing, what is the point of holding the token?
Ripple Is Not XRP
Now, this is the big one. Ripple is not XRP. Almost all the promoters put Ripple and XRP together as if they are one entity, as if Ripple succeeding means anything for XRP succeeding. This, I would say, is the number one point you really need to understand. Even if the fantasy scenario comes true, even if trillions of dollars move, I will get into the data, it is still not going to pump the token, because the fees are so small. This is a no-win scenario for holding XRP, in my opinion. There is almost no way you win.
First, Ripple. Ripple raised $500 million in 2025. They have a $40 billion private valuation. They have six business lines. But holding XRP gives you zero equity in Ripple the company. You are totally dependent on Ripple choosing to give value to a blockchain they do not need and do not even have to use. If you hold XRP, you are taking a giant leap of faith that they will bring value to the blockchain, which they have no obligation to do. They do hold a lot of XRP, so they want to give it value, but they can create businesses and operate however they want with no responsibility to the XRP token. Do you see what a huge problem that is?
Ripple could become successful infrastructure. I do not think it will, because the biggest problem we are facing is that the whole internet needs to be rebuilt as it comes under pressure from AI and cybercrime. In my belief, only ICP can do that, and once you build on ICP, there is no reason to use anything else for transactions. So XRP does not even make sense, because our existing system is failing and you do not need XRP to make the existing system better, and if you want to build a better system, you do not need XRP either.
Even the promoters point to RLUSD, but you already have Circle's stablecoin, you already have Tether, and a whole bunch of other stablecoins. There is a ton of competition already. Even if Ripple succeeds with that, how much of that success flows back into increasing the value of your token? Almost none. Someone in the audience said they had $40K in XRP and honestly felt it was worthless, only earning 2% interest from using Flare XRP. In my view you are taking a huge risk with that, because if Flare goes down, you could lose everything, and if anything happens with XRP, you could lose everything. Your risk is multiplied. A 2% interest for being in a much more dangerous situation is, to me, definitely not worth it.
RLUSD: The Product That Competes With the Token
Now let us look at RLUSD, the product that competes with the token. Most promoters will tell you Ripple's stablecoin is here to bring all this value to the token. But look at the details. It is Ripple's own stablecoin designed to hold one US dollar, issued both on the XRP Ledger and on Ethereum. Does anybody see a problem with that? Why would it be on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum? Just think about it. If it is on Ethereum, what they are effectively saying is there is not enough activity on the XRP Ledger to merit keeping it only on the XRP Ledger, so they put it on Ethereum too. Ripple wants to make a profit. The XRP Ledger is there if it makes them money, and they do not need it if it does not. That is a huge problem.
Ripple's payments page says cross-border payments can tokenize fiat in the stablecoin. Last I checked, I am not having a hard time sending cross-border payments with the existing system, and there are already a bunch of other stablecoins. Stablecoins are easier because they carry no price risk. So here is the question: if institutions can use the stablecoin, or other stablecoins, for payments, why would they hold XRP long term? The hypers say they will need to hold it to swap it. But look at the blockchain. None of that is happening. A stablecoin payment is not XRP demand. Stablecoins might be the product-market fit, but what happens if RLUSD does great on Ethereum, or gets mostly used on Ethereum or ICP? Then you do not need XRP and the XRP Ledger anymore. It is a house of cards built on people's ignorance. People outside of crypto are not ignorant about this. And what happens when that ignorance clears up? It is going to be interesting.
The Bridge Asset Math
Now the favorite bull story, told apart from a calculator: payment volume is not market cap. The classic pitch is that XRP is going to settle global payments. Why would XRP settle global payments when there are all these other players trying to do the same thing? XRP cannot do what ICP can do. It does not have the usage Solana has. Clearly, Ripple does not think the XRP Ledger is strong enough on its own to merit keeping its stablecoin only on the XRP Ledger. If they did, they would not put it on Ethereum too.
Even in the scenario the holders describe, where XRP is held as a bridge for a few seconds, the same XRP can be reused a thousand times a day, and the transactions are tiny. You could hold a little bit of XRP, swap it a huge number of times, and there would be hardly any fees from it. Payment volume is not the same as market cap. The market cap is already so gigantic that it does not matter if XRP is held for a couple of seconds as a bridge and swapped back and forth, because any company doing this would hold the bare minimum. As someone pointed out, Canton is trying to do the same thing XRP is, and XLM is trying to do the same thing. There is massive competition and very little utility or differentiation.
The Inventory Math
Nobody in their right mind is going to hold more XRP than the bare minimum they need to swap, because they do not want to take the price risk on XRP either. So here is a little of the inventory math. Even if you send a billion dollars a day in payments with a five-second hold time, you only need about $57,000 in XRP in flight at any moment. Even $100 billion a day, you would only need to hold about $5 million in XRP. Even if you sent a trillion dollars a day, more than all the global card networks, you would only need about $57 million in XRP.
Even if you stretch the hold time to five minutes, you would still only need a few hundred million dollars in XRP, and the market cap is so big that is not even a meaningful purchase. Ripple gets more than that unlocked every month or two. Even if you sent a trillion dollars a day, more than Mastercard and Visa combined, even if XRP became the global payments ledger and you held it for five minutes, which you would not, you would still only need about $3.7 billion. That is a rounding error, less than 5% of the total, and that is not even fully diluted. This ignores all slippage, liquidity buffers, and inventory, and it is still not even close to the present valuation, even at full adoption. And remember, roughly 1 billion XRP unlocks every three months, which is billions of dollars.
Even at full-scale fantasy where XRP dominates, the XRP price does not go up meaningfully. Maybe it goes up a dollar. You get a 2X. Congratulations, you held forever for a 2X. Even the math of fantasyland goes nowhere, and fantasyland is unreasonable right now because of the existing data: $360 a day in fees. Not exactly exciting.
The Supply Overhang
The supply overhang is miserable. For everyone who loves fair-launch coins, this is the opposite of a fair-launch coin. When XRP was created, there were 100 billion tokens created, and 80 billion were given to Ripple. People complain about ICP tokenomics; this will make you beg for ICP tokenomics. Ripple got 80%, and the company is valued at $40 billion. They do not even need all the XRP they have. In my view, this has been a brilliant scheme on their part to print themselves a fortune while doing almost nothing for the world. Unfortunately, that is crypto.
XRP was not mined or staked into existence. 100 billion XRP were created and 80 billion of it, worth $80 billion in today's dollars, went to Ripple. When I first got into XRP, this stuff was nearly worthless, yet somehow they managed to pay everyone to talk about it, because they held 80% of the whole chain. Ripple's own page says that as of April 30, 2026, they still hold 38 billion XRP, which is $38 billion, with $33 billion of it sitting in escrow. This means, in my opinion, the price in almost no practical scenario can pump.
I hate to burst the bubble of people making claims like XRP to $10,000 on their thumbnails, but even XRP getting to $10 is, in my view, so unrealistic it is almost comedic, because that would mean Ripple would be getting roughly $10 billion a month handed to them. This is completely one-sided in favor of Ripple, and it makes no sense to me for crypto retail to be holding this. This has been going on since 2012. It is 14 years later and they still have all these XRP tokens.
The SEC Case
Now let us look at the SEC case, because yes, XRP did pump off Trump winning and the SEC case. But what has happened since then? It is not a clean victory either. The case ended in 2025 with a $125 million fine. The retail exchange side survived, but the institutional side was the problem, the exact category of sales the court flagged. XRP got legal clarity, but not total vindication. If the court sanctioned the institutional side, what does that say about the entire institutional adoption pitch? To me the legal clarity is not a big signal in XRP's favor at this point. The price pump from it has evaporated. All the crypto retail getting in, all the hype and the bots and the lies, and the price is still around a dollar. It has gone nowhere in four years.
Decentralization
If you are in crypto, I would hope you care about decentralization. Bitcoin has proof of work. Ethereum has staking and slashing. The XRP Ledger essentially says, just trust this list of people. It uses a unique node list model, and the servers need high overlap to avoid forks, with the worst case possibly requiring 90% overlap. So how decentralized is a network that depends on nearly everyone trusting the same recommended list of validators? To me, there is no meaningful decentralization in XRP. So it is the opposite of a fair launch, no meaningful decentralization, and absolutely overvalued to an insane degree, with a company producing all the hype that has no obligation to it and is clearly not fully committed to XRP itself either.
It gets worse. Nobody even pays the validators. They do not get block rewards, staking rewards, or fee revenue. Ripple does not want to pay validators because it costs about as much to run an email server. But if validators are unpaid volunteers, who is going to keep doing this? It makes no sense. They hold $33 billion in escrow, but there is not even an APY. If the price does not go up, the only reason to hold XRP is the belief that the price will go up. Based on what I have shown, why would you have any belief that the price will go up? And we are not done. The validator situation is horrible: unpaid volunteers, and no real decentralization in that either.
The Ghost Town Ledger
The Ghost Town Ledger. I have been saying this for years. If you are holding XRP, have you actually looked at the ledger data yourself? Because I have, quite a bit, and this is why I sold. The first time I looked at the XRP Ledger data, while I was actually holding XRP, I thought, this is a ghost town, I need to get out before everyone figures it out.
The XRP token is valued like it is world-changing financial technology. Meanwhile, there is around $38 million in DeFi. The market cap to TVL is roughly 1,792 times off. Compare that to Ethereum, where there is something like $70 billion of TVL and the market cap is maybe two or three times that. On XRP, the market cap is thousands of times the TVL, and there is only a few million dollars of daily DEX volume. Right now the total DEX versus centralized exchange share is about 0.02%. There is almost no DeFi activity on the XRP blockchain.
Almost all the activity with XRP is people buying and selling on centralized exchanges, which mostly do not even create transactions on the XRP blockchain. So almost all XRP activity is off-chain. How are you going to accumulate value on-chain when everybody is just swapping XRP on exchanges? It is primarily a traded asset. The on-chain economy is nearly nonexistent. If people claim XRP is a powerful on-chain liquidity network, why is nobody using it for DeFi? That is another question I do not think any XRP bull has a decent answer to.
Look at this: 1.6 million transactions, $360 in fees. By the way, ICP does several thousand transactions a second, which blows XRP away. And while XRP shows high transaction counts compared to a lot of other ghost chains, a 2020 study found that 94% of XRP Ledger transactions carried no economic value, and I imagine it is similar today, with a decent amount of spam or bots trying to make it look like there is activity. The real question is how many XRP transactions actually carry real economic value. When even the charts look terrible compared to ICP, Solana, and Ethereum, the amount of real value being moved is totally off. Yes, the gas fee is ridiculously small, but ICP's is smaller and so is Solana's. It is cheap but not invisible.
Here is another problem. If you have used XRP off a centralized exchange, you know you have to keep one XRP just sitting there as a reserve. I moved all my XRP to a wallet and could not withdraw all of it. I think the reserve used to be 10 XRP. What kind of setup is this for a regular person, where you have to just sit there holding a reserve? This is the exact kind of friction that keeps normal users away. I remember using that and selling my XRP right after, thinking, what kind of wallet setup is this?
Someone brought up that XRP billion-dollar acquisitions are bullish for the future. But how does that make sense in the context of everything here, and is that Ripple or XRP the token itself? If Ripple is buying something, that is one thing, but that is not the XRP token itself buying it. Meanwhile, holders talk like this is going to get mass adoption, but how many people holding XRP have ever actually sent an XRP transaction? I have sent a number of XRP transactions myself, back a decade ago, when XRP was one of the fastest ways to transfer. I would swap all my crypto to XRP, send it to another exchange, and swap it back to Bitcoin instead of waiting 30 minutes for Bitcoin and paying a higher fee. XRP 10 years ago used to be useful.
No Modern App Stack
Today, hardly anybody holding XRP actually uses the ledger, which is exactly why the data shows what it shows. This gets even worse going into the future, because we now have ICP, where you can build entire apps fully on chain. Meanwhile, XRP is valued like it can do something amazing, but you have to use all this third-party stuff off the blockchain to do almost anything with it. XRP can send payments, for sure. It can send a transaction from one address to another. But on the base layer, you cannot even do smart contracts. There are all these others that can do smart contracts.
Yes, they now have an EVM sidechain, in 2025. Congratulations, 13 years in, you brought on a sidechain that can do smart contracts, but it is connected through Axelar, which I do not love either, which means if anything in between is hacked or any trust point is compromised, holders are exposed. XRP does not have a modern app stack. In my view it is no competition even against Ethereum, which is old and clunky at this point, or Solana, which I called unsustainable the day before. Next to ICP, I believe XRP is utterly irrelevant. If the base layer does not even have smart contracts and has to use a sidechain, that is, to me, very bad.
Someone said XRP holders are like a battered spouse who refuses to leave, and unfortunately that seems to be the mindset. It is, I got into this coin and I just do not want to be wrong, so I will wait until the price goes up so I can sell it and say I was right. But what if it just goes down from here? If you are on the Titanic and you just hit the iceberg, the smart thing to do is grab a lifeboat before they are all gone.
The crazy thing is I have met people in person like this. I met a guy who said, I put $20 in XRP and I am really looking forward to it being my down payment on a mortgage someday. I was baffled. He said he saw a video on YouTube saying it could be $10,000 someday, so someday he is going to have tens of thousands of dollars for a down payment on a house. He bought back when it was around $2, so he has lost money on it. He put in $20, got about 10 XRP, and today he has about $10. I told him, for XRP to be worth that, it would have to be worth more than all the wealth in the entire world, and the odds of that are effectively zero.
Here is the thing. You could have had the same experience with ICP, but with ICP, in my belief, everything points to a massive potential explosion at some point based on the technology. With XRP, I do not see any indication that it is anything but an overvalued blockchain that, in my opinion, has no future, which is why I am doing this. Someone noted it is weird how popular XRP is. Exactly. In my view it is just marketing and paying people.
The Institutional Roadmap
Now look at the institutional roadmap for XRP. You watch videos about compliance rails, but wait a second, these are not your rails. Institutions may love a chain that supports compliance, but where exactly does XRP upside come from in that world? These features make part of the ecosystem look compliant, but it is not permissionless, and they apply to issued tokens rather than native XRP. They shape a story. The less obvious question is why the retail token has any value in this scenario. These things could be useful if they actually get adopted, but that does not mean value flows to the XRP token, as I have already demonstrated.
ICP, in my view, can do everything better than XRP, and I have not even factored that into this analysis. ICP can build the entire infrastructure, the entire web stack, all on ICP. It already has built-in trusted credentials and every single thing you could want. Ripple is hyping the idea that value will somehow accrue to the XRP token. ICP can do all of that better.
The Partnership Flex
All the things signaled in hype videos are not real XRP demand, including the partnership flex. At this point, honestly, if you give me a million dollars, I will probably partner with you too, but that does not mean we are going to do anything useful. A lot of companies and people will take money to talk about partnerships when they have no intention of any substance. Picture your company. Ripple comes and says, we will give you $100 million, announce a partnership, and do a little planning meeting about building something. The company says sure, takes the money, somebody probably gets a kickback, and they announce a partnership. Then what? Announcing a partnership is one thing. Actually doing something meaningful with it is another.
So in almost every case, in my opinion, these partnerships across all of crypto are meaningless, because they are just based on paying the company to announce a partnership so that crypto retail and financial engineering push the price higher. Then people anchor to that new higher price and buy without thinking. Then the insiders start dumping. As soon as the price goes up, they start selling to take profits. And again, these are Ripple partnerships. Ripple is a private company, not XRP, not the XRP Ledger. Their partnerships may bring value to their equity, but in most cases not at all to XRP.
Then there is the ETF mirage. Is it true Ripple has 14% of SWIFT liquidity? I do not know. Based on the data I see, it is certainly not showing up on the XRP Ledger, and even if it is, it is not generating any significant amount of XRP fees. These figures get thrown around. Do you realize anybody can put up any kind of XRP video and say whatever they want about it, generally with no consequences? The main consequence is that if you upset an entity like Ripple, which has a huge legal team, they could come at you. That is why, in my view, people are not going after XRP like this. There are actually more consequences for telling the truth than for telling people what they want to hear.
The whole system is set up to reward people who say anything to get views and validate your confirmation bias, and to punish those who might upset a well-funded entity, without any requirement that it be fair or have legal merit. Crypto is set up so poorly that telling the truth is often dangerous and nobody wants to hear it, while lying to you is rewarded. To me that is more a function of capitalism we will eventually have to fix.
So the partnership flexes and the ETF mirage are shallow hype narratives. Who is going to buy XRP through an ETF and put their money in without doing this research? You can certainly have some ignorant crypto retail do that, but generally, the more money people have, the more they research. If you have coins and you want to know the truth about them, ask me, and I will be happy to share my honest take. In my community you get direct access to me, and members can get a call with me on Zoom included. Come join me here.
I have seen people show me tens of thousands of dollars of XRP in their portfolios who then sold it. They said, yeah, this is pretty fucked, I hear you, I am going to sell this. The ones I am thinking of sold at around $2 to $2.50 and moved into ICP or Bitcoin. I do not give financial advice; I lead by example. The idea that people are going to plow huge amounts into ETFs, ETPs, futures, and retirement platforms without doing any research, I hope does not happen. It can happen, but keep in mind there will be a lot of other options besides XRP, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and ICP. XRP is not going to be sitting there by itself.
The more money people have to invest, the more they tend to be careful and look things up, unlike people investing smaller amounts hoping for 100X. Ironically, you would think someone who can barely afford $100 would research everything and very carefully deploy it, but it is often the opposite. The people who have more money tend to do much more research and are less likely to be fooled into these ETFs and ETPs. Yes, people plowed money into Bitcoin ETFs, but Bitcoin has branding and is the dominant crypto. Most people in crypto do not really know much about XRP.
If people do any research, it is going to look horrible, because the hype videos are so obviously shallow that the average person who is not vulnerable to that can pick up on it. So all these partnerships and ETFs, all the XRP hype, are not real, sustainable, definite XRP demand. And even if it is a significant amount, you would need to buy billions and billions of dollars just to move the price a little. Exchanges can now financially engineer this with derivatives, so if you pair a narrative with derivatives and financial engineering, you can get the XRP price to shoot from 50 cents to $2.50. But that is hard to sustain over time, which is why the XRP price has plummeted and lost almost everything it gained over the last four years and gone nowhere.
If you want the truth, which announcement in the history of XRP has actually moved on-chain economics instead of just moving the price? In my view, zero. There are zero announcements that ever actually moved the on-chain economy rather than the price. If you made good money on XRP, you can say thank you for that, because other people lost money for you to make it. Or maybe Ripple bought it off of you at $2, which seems unlikely. At this point, if you are selling XRP, you are selling to someone less clued in than you are, and that is kind of sad. These coins are sad and pathetic to me, which is why I do not hold any of them. It makes me angry to see my fellow brothers and sisters getting sold XRP and buying it while every effort is made to defend the ignorance around it.
The Real World Asset Story
Let us continue. The real world asset story: XRP is hilariously under-engaged. In my opinion, the real world asset story cannot carry a $69 billion valuation, and that is not even fully diluted. Right now you have, in theory, a little less than a billion dollars in XRPL stablecoins, and 94% of that is RLUSD. But keep in mind, this is a fraction of the amount on Ethereum. Ethereum has something like 70 times as much value locked in stablecoins, liquid staking, and everything else, yet it only has maybe two or three times as much fully diluted value as XRP. Do you see how far off these metrics are?
Meanwhile, the real world asset all-time high on XRP is $281 million, but the valuation is in the billions. Again, this is off by a huge magnitude. A billion dollars in stablecoins, in the world of finance that XRP and Ripple claim to be in, is a tiny amount, barely worth mentioning. Look at how much Circle and Tether have in stablecoins. Ripple is trying to compete in that world, and the XRP Ledger is not even capturing all of that directly on XRP. Even if the stablecoins and tokenized assets go awesome, which I think is unlikely, the XRP price is still not likely to move.
The Whole Argument, Summarized
Now we are almost there. I have tried to make a comprehensive breakdown of XRP so I never need to cover it again. Here is the whole argument. XRP is a $69 billion asset right now, and $111 billion fully diluted, attached to a ledger burning hundreds of dollars a day in fees. This is off by a factor of hundreds of thousands of times. The difference should only be 10, maybe 100 times at most. XRP, to me, looks at least 100 times overvalued, if not 1,000 times. If I were appraising this, I would say XRP is between 500 and 1,000 times overvalued. That means I would imagine a high likelihood of losses of 90-plus percent on XRP. In my belief, 10 cents is much more likely than $10. One cent is more likely than even $20 or $30. This has a huge bear case and an extremely limited upside. It is too big already, and there is nothing to merit how big it currently is.
I say the fantasy multiple on XRP is at least a thousand times overvalued against the chain fees. Even if XRP goes down 99%, to me it is still overvalued, because even then the fees would still be about 5,000 times the valuation. To me there is no way this survives outside of complete and utter ignorance by everyone holding XRP. Even 10% of XRP holders digging into some of this, because they are burned out on the price dumping and wondering what is going on, starting to use AI to look up basic facts about why XRP struggles, will find these numbers and think, I am out. That is what I did. I sold my XRP in 2023. I am out, and I am never coming back.
If you were appraising this, how much would you pay if you stripped it down and pretended XRP was a company? How much would you pay for a company earning about $131,000 a year in revenue with no dividend, no buyback, and no claim on Ripple? In an optimistic scenario, if you were trying to sell something like this to someone else, you would be lucky to get a million or a couple million dollars for it. Meanwhile, it is valued at a hundred and some billion fully diluted.
So here are the questions every XRP answer struggles with. If XRPL burns hundreds of dollars a day in fees, where is the value going to XRP holders? If Ripple Payments use stablecoins and largely bypass XRP, running on chains like Ethereum that do not require XRP at all, where is the value going to XRP? If XRP is just a bridge asset for seconds, why does even the theoretical massive payment volume require this big of a market cap? These questions, in my view, destroy every fantasy about XRP having any realistic valuation right now. Why should retail accept a token where 80 billion XRP was gifted to the company? How is this going to survive with unpaid validators? Where is any real decentralization? Where is the DeFi? For a chain supposedly about financial plumbing, where are all the DEXs?
If RLUSD is institutional payment, is XRP not becoming less and less necessary over time? If you cannot even do smart contracts without an EVM sidechain, come on. This is, in my opinion, too easy. I said this at the beginning: I held this. I bought into this. I remember buying $1,000 of XRP after getting an email from some love-and-light spiritual person who did not know much about crypto, and at the time I was eight years into crypto and making crypto videos. If I am any indication of the future, and if AI is any indication of the future, people in crypto are going to get smarter. They are going to see through this and sell when they realize it.
I know, because I have been there. I have been the person who bought XRP, and I found a way out. You know the way out? Admitting I was wrong. Admitting I did poor research. Admitting the business model looks unsustainable. Admitting that when I look at the actual stats, none of the hype matches the actual data. And looking in the mirror and saying, I was wrong about XRP, let me sell it while I still can. I did this research originally because I wanted to know if what I was holding had any value. So I have been an XRP holder. I know what it is like. And that is why, to me, there are no escape hatches for this. In my belief, this goes to zero or down 99% in the overwhelming majority of scenarios. It is one of the riskiest coins for a collapse in all of crypto. To me it is purely a cult coin with no value behind the cult; you do not even get anything for holding it.
Where is the escape hatch for XRP? The truth is up against the hype, and I believe the truth is going to win. Everything that keeps happening accelerates it. As AI accelerates, in my view XRP becomes more irrelevant. As cybercrime accelerates, it becomes more relevant to rebuild the internet on something like ICP, and XRP becomes more irrelevant. As ICP gains adoption, XRP becomes more irrelevant. Even in the best-case scenarios, XRP has almost no upside. The best you are likely to get is another heavily financially engineered pump that, at the absolute best case, takes it to $2 or $3, and then it loses all of that again. That is the last gasp, and it may not even happen. I would never hold a coin where my best-case scenario is a 2X or 3X and I have to watch every day to make sure I do not miss it. I hold ICP because I believe it could easily be 100-plus X. In my view, XRP in no realistic scenario is even a 20X, let alone 100X, and in the vast majority of scenarios you are never going to even see a 10X. It is too big already. So I do not see where XRP has any kind of future with any kind of hope.
The Smartest Position Is Willingness to Change Your Mind
The smartest position is being willing to change your mind when you realize how hopeless a situation is. Like the last day I drank and was hungover in bed, I realized how hopeless my situation was, and I became willing to do anything to get out of it. Getting sober and going to AA took a lot of effort. Getting out of XRP is simple by comparison.
Let me show you how simple it is. You open your Coinbase app. I do not hold any XRP, but I will walk through the exact clicks. You tap XRP, you tap sell, and you take whatever the market gives you. Notice I am not giving you financial advice here. You swipe over, put all of it in, tap preview sell order, tap sell, and now you have the dollars in your account. Someone said never sell low. But in my view, if you are in a position that is hopeless, you take what you can get. If it were me, and this is not financial advice, I would sell all of it today, because the price could be one cent in the future. Would you rather sell at a dollar or at one cent?
Consider this dynamic too: a lot of people are not selling XRP today because they plan to exit the moment it ever hits $2 again. So it can barely go up, because most of the people holding it do not really believe in it anymore and are ready to exit immediately.
An Invitation to Join Me
If you made it all the way to the end, I have a community for you where you can message me directly. We have a weekly group call right now where we talk a lot about YouTube and crypto. You can share pictures of your crypto portfolio, ask me about the coins you hold and get my honest take, make some new friends, and jump on those weekly group calls with me. Newer members can also get a one-on-one call with me. You get accountability and growth, belonging and community, and it is not just about crypto. It is about living a healthy life and mastering AI, YouTube, business, and money. I am using and doing all of that right now. I have this passion because I love my brothers and sisters, and I cannot stand watching people get destroyed by coins like this. If you want to talk crypto honestly, look up more of my breakdowns in my Crypto Reviews playlist, and then come join me and talk with us here.