Let me explain the least thrilling thing in crypto.
Most stories in this industry arrive dressed as revolutions. Tear down the banks, storm the citadel, replace the whole rotten edifice with something pure and mathematical. XRP’s story is not that story. XRP’s story is a plumber. It has no interest whatsoever in demolishing your bank; it would like a quiet word about the pipes running underneath it: pipes almost nobody knows exist, and which are, I promise you, an absolute disgrace.
I’ll be honest with you about where I stand. Of everything I’ve examined in this market, this is the use case I find most interesting to study. Not the most exciting. Not the one that will make anybody rich by Friday. Simply the one where I can point at a real problem, name the people it hurts, and show you a mechanism that plausibly fixes it. I’m not telling you what to do with that; I never will. But I am going to show you the whole picture, including places where enthusiasts are quietly fibbing to you, because if I only served you the flattering half, I’d be no better than the man in your inbox with a chart and a dream.
The four days I lost my money
Years ago, I sent a sum abroad that mattered a great deal to me. It left my account. It then simply ceased to exist for four days, somewhere over the Atlantic, presumably enjoying itself before turning up at the other end noticeably lighter than when it had set off. Nobody had lied to me. Nobody had explained anything either. It had been quietly nibbled at in transit by institutions I had never heard of and would never meet.
Here is what actually happened, and it is madder than you’d guess. When money crosses a border, it doesn’t travel; it is relayed, hopping between correspondent banks: institutions that hold accounts for one another precisely so they can pass the parcel along, each taking a small, silent slice for the privilege. And for this pantomime to work at all, banks must keep piles of cash parked in foreign accounts in advance, doing absolutely nothing, on the off chance somebody wants to send money that way. Dead money, dozing in Tokyo. Dead money, sunbathing in São Paulo.
You’ll see spectacular estimates of how much capital is asleep, its trillions, and I’d hold every one at arm’s length, since they tend to be produced by people who’d rather like to sell you the alarm clock. But the principle isn’t in dispute. The money is real. It is snoring.
Enter the plumber
XRP was built to wake it up, and the mechanism is genuinely elegant. Rather than parking pounds in Tokyo, you convert to XRP, send it across the ledger in about four seconds, and convert it to yen on arrival. No dead capital. No line-up of strangers nibbling at the fee. It costs a fraction of a penny, needs no mining, barely any electricity, and the whole transaction before your kettle boils.
In places, this genuinely works. One of Japan’s largest remittance firms runs live XRP corridors into the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia. Payment hubs across Southeast Asia and Latin America move real money for real people this way.
And here is the part that moves me, without a trace of sentimentality. Remittance corridors are precisely where the current system gouges hardest; it takes its biggest bites from the people with the least. A migrant worker wiring wages home has always paid a worse rate than a hedge fund moving a hundred times as much. That is not a law of physics. It is a choice, made by an industry with no earthly incentive to change it, and it is exactly the sort of quiet, structural unfairness that made me care about finance in the first place.
Now the part the enthusiasts won’t mention
Here I must be your friend rather than your cheerleader, because this is the most important paragraph on the page.
You will read, endlessly, that “over 300 financial institutions use XRP.” They do not. Over three hundred use RippleNet, Ripple’s messaging system. Think of it as a rather better SWIFT, a modern telephone line strung between banks. Most of those institutions never touch the token. Only one Ripple product requires XRP, and a growing, selective handful have adopted it.
Santander, forever trotted out as the flagship, largely uses the messaging rails rather than the token. Bank of America has poked at Ripple’s technology and has never once confirmed XRP; this fact hasn’t stopped anyone from putting its logo in a graphic. Even Ripple has acknowledged that many clients prefer to settle without using the token. And Ripple now sells banks a stablecoin, approved in New York at the end of 2024, precisely because many institutions would rather not hold a wobbly asset even for four seconds.
Read that last sentence twice. Ripple’s own product catalogue quietly concedes the central risk.
So if you take nothing else from me today, take this reflex and keep it for life: every time you see a bank’s name beside a token, ask: is this institution using the network, or is it using the coin? Those are wildly different sentences, and only one of them creates demand for the asset.
Why the dreadful old system refuses to die
Which brings me to the idea that explains this entire saga better than any roadmap, and it concerns the keyboard you are almost certainly touching.
QWERTY is not the fastest layout ever designed. Better ones were built and demonstrated decades ago. Nobody uses them, not because we’re idiots, but because every keyboard, every typing class and every pair of hands already knows this one, and no individual gains by switching alone. The economist Paul David called it path dependence: an inferior standard, fossilised by history, defended by the sheer inconvenience of everyone having to move at once.
Correspondent banking is finance’s QWERTY. It is slow, opaque and expensive, and it is welded into the compliance systems, legal contracts and decades-old software of every bank on earth. XRP’s obstacle was never the technology. Being faster and cheaper wins arguments; it does not, by itself, win markets. The only question that matters is whether the pain of staying finally outgrows the pain of moving.
The court case, told properly
In December 2020, the SEC sued Ripple, alleging it was sold as an unregistered security. Exchanges delisted it. The price fell off a cliff.
The 2023 ruling is universally reported as a triumph; it wasn’t, quite. Judge Torres split the baby: XRP sold to the public on exchanges was not a securities transaction; Ripple’s direct sales to institutions were a genuine violation, bringing a $125 million penalty and a permanent injunction against doing it again. Both sides dropped their appeals in August 2025, and the case finally ended.
A real victory, then, on the question that mattered most to ordinary holders, sitting beside a real defeat that cost real money. It survived, and survival counts for a great deal in this industry. But “XRP is not a security” is a headline, not a judgment, and I’d rather you knew the difference than repeated the slogan.
What supporters see, and what could go wrong
The supporters’ argument is modest: banks are not going anywhere. Their plumbing, however, is Victorian. Less revolution, more renovation, and I have always rather liked a renovation.
Now the ways this could go wrong are worth writing down, because conviction without a list of ways you could be an idiot is merely enthusiasm in a suit. Ripple still holds an enormous share of the supply, mostly locked away and released over time, meaning one company’s decisions shape this asset’s destiny in a way Bitcoin’s cheerful anarchy makes impossible. Its consensus model is more centralised than Bitcoin’s. Central bank digital currencies and bank-issued stablecoins are hunting the same job, and have rather better manners at a regulator’s dinner party. And the biggest risk of all is the one no marketing department will print: XRP’s success requires institutions to choose the coin, not merely the software. So far, a great many have politely declined.
None of that makes it less interesting to study. This corner of crypto is worth understanding because it’s fixing something genuinely broken and costly, and because it doesn’t require the world to end to succeed; a very old pipe needs replacing with a better one.
So I watch adoption rather than price. I ask relentlessly whether each shiny new partnership involves the asset or merely the plumbing. And I never go near anything I couldn’t explain to a friend in two minutes flat, which is the whole discipline in a sentence: know exactly what you own. That habit is worth more than any brilliant conviction.
XRP is not the most exciting story in crypto. It may be rarer and more useful: a credible one, with its question marks still honestly attached. Whether it deserves a place in your thinking is a question only you can answer, and it deserves more than five minutes of it.
This is me, thinking out loud in your company: educational commentary, not financial advice. Capital is always at risk, and what you do next is gloriously your own affair. For one clear lesson on money, markets and crypto every Sunday, join The Jacqueline Read, free.
The Jacqueline Brand: knowledge builds confidence, and confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for information and education only. It is not financial, investment or professional advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. The Jacqueline Brand is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and past performance is not a guide to future returns. Figures were correct at the time of publication. Always do your own research and consider speaking to a regulated adviser. Where cryptoassets are discussed, they are high risk and largely unregulated in the UK, and you could lose all the money you invest.
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