Major Wall Street investors poured $500 million into Ripple in 2025 — a figure that reflects just how embedded XRP has become in the company’s financial backbone, and why analysts say Ripple has little reason to walk away from it.
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A newly circulated academic paper, published in Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research, argues that XRP’s role in Ripple’s cross-border payment network makes abandonment not just unlikely, but structurally difficult. The paper was brought to wider attention by XRP community researcher SMQKE.
The Case Against Cutting Ties
Ripple Payments — formerly known as RippleNet — uses XRP as a bridge asset to move money across borders quickly and cheaply. According to the paper, that dependency runs deep. XRP helps guard against double-spending risks while cutting the delays that plague traditional payment systems.
Banks like Bank of America and Santander are among the financial institutions connected to Ripple’s network. That kind of institutional footprint makes any sudden pivot away from XRP a complicated proposition, reports indicate.
‼️ WHY RIPPLE WILL NEVER ABANDON XRP‼️
Read closely.😶🌫️
“Because RippleNet DEPENDS much on XRP, the XRP will coexist with Ripple Labs.”✅
“In this way, as long as Ripple Labs is widely used for its cross-board real-time payment business, the XRP market will ALWAYS work as a… pic.twitter.com/9YZvBLoExt
— SMQKE (@SMQKEDQG) March 13, 2026
The paper stops short of declaring XRP untouchable. It points to regulatory tightening and rival technologies as real threats that could reshape how Ripple operates in the long run. Still, its central conclusion is that XRP and Ripple are likely to remain tied together for the foreseeable future.
XRP’s Broader Ambitions
Beyond payments, Ripple has explored positioning XRP as a neutral go-between for central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. The idea is that XRP could connect different national digital currencies without requiring the parties to rely on traditional financial intermediaries.
That ambition signals something important. Ripple isn’t treating XRP as a legacy product to be quietly retired. Based on reports, the company has been actively expanding its use cases rather than winding them down.
CEO Brad Garlinghouse has publicly described XRP as the company’s guiding purpose. His exact words, often repeated in the XRP community: “XRP is our north star.”
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Stablecoin Launch Adds A New Layer
Ripple’s rollout of RLUSD, its own stablecoin, has fed speculation that XRP might be getting sidelined. Some observers read the move as a sign that Ripple is hedging its bets with a more stable asset.
Ripple executives have pushed back on that reading. They maintain XRP is not being replaced — that RLUSD operates alongside it, not instead of it.
The academic paper largely supports that position. It frames XRP as central to both network security and overall system efficiency, not as a technology on its way out. Whether that holds as stablecoins gain ground across the broader payments industry remains an open question.
Featured image from Pexels, chart from TradingView
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