XRP Will Not Make
You Rich Either.

XRP reached its all-time high of approximately $3.84 in January 2018. Anyone who bought near that peak and held to today has not merely lost in nominal terms — they have lost against the very monetary debasement the XRP army cites as the reason to hold.

CPI-adjusted (CPIAUCSL): $3.84 in January 2018 is equivalent to approximately $5.20 in May 2026 dollars. XRP at $1.37 is 74% below its inflation-adjusted ATH.

M2-adjusted: US M2 money supply has grown approximately 67% since early 2018. M2-adjusted, the January 2018 ATH is equivalent to approximately $6.40 in today's monetary terms. XRP at $1.37 is 79% below its M2-adjusted ATH.

The debasement argument cuts both ways. If you are holding XRP because the dollar is being debased — you are holding an asset that has lost more value than the currency you are fleeing. In the currency you say is broken. Over seven years. That is the number the community never shows.

The XRP army's core belief is that XRP is fundamentally different — that its role in global settlement means normal valuation frameworks don't apply. This is false. Market cap is price multiplied by supply. There is no mechanism by which a token can be "worth" $10,000 without its total market cap equating to that price times the number of tokens in existence. This is not an opinion about XRP's utility. It is arithmetic.

The global settlement argument — that XRP needs to be expensive to move large sums efficiently — was addressed and demolished in Claver's own source material. Settlement systems do not require the settlement asset to be worth the value being settled. SWIFT moves trillions daily without the underlying asset being worth trillions. The argument confuses a ratio with a requirement.

Unlike Bitcoin — where supply is produced through computational work, energy expenditure, and open market discovery — Ripple Labs created 100 billion XRP tokens in a single genesis event. No mining. No proof of work. No external validation of scarcity. A private company in San Francisco typed a number into a ledger and the tokens existed.

Of those 100 billion, Ripple placed 55 billion into escrow and retained the rest across company and founder wallets. The XRP army calls this an "inflation control mechanism." The more accurate term is a pre-mine — the practice, almost universally condemned in crypto circles when anyone other than Ripple does it, of creating tokens before any public market exists and reserving the majority for the issuer.

The "decentralised global payment rail" argument therefore begins with a privately created, privately controlled token supply — held in escrow by the same private company whose promotional materials the army treats as research. The bank owns the money. This has always been the structure. It has never been meaningfully addressed by the community that claims to be escaping exactly this arrangement.

The core XRP bull case is that banks will use it for international settlement. What the army never asks is the follow-up question: why XRP specifically? Cross-border payment capability is not a proprietary feature. Any cryptocurrency that can be sold at the destination — including memecoins, stablecoins, and tokens created in an afternoon — technically fulfils the same remittance function. "It can move value across borders" describes every token ever issued.

The real question is whether major financial institutions will voluntarily route settlement flows through a volatile asset they don't control, at a price set by a speculative market, to save on SWIFT fees they already negotiate at near-zero on large flows. The answer, demonstrated repeatedly by the banks that have piloted RippleNet: they adopt the messaging protocol and skip the XRP token entirely. ODL (On-Demand Liquidity) — the product that actually requires XRP — has never been adopted at a scale that supports the valuation thesis, and Ripple has never disclosed ODL volumes with enough specificity to allow independent verification.

The utility narrative exists because it provides a story that separates XRP from pure speculation. The story is not false in its entirety. The problem is that the story, taken at face value, implies a token price in the low single digits — not $10,000. Utility and price target are two separate claims, and the army has conflated them from the beginning.

The XRP adoption thesis relies on a moment — referred to in the community as "the switch" — where global banks simultaneously activate XRP settlement as their preferred cross-border rail. This assumption could only be made by someone who has never been involved in a core banking migration.

Major financial institutions do not run monolithic systems. A single tier-1 bank operates dozens of payment stacks across divisions — each with their own FX engines, compliance layers, reconciliation processes, and years of bespoke legacy code that predates the internet and cannot be switched off without regulatory sign-off across multiple jurisdictions. Divisions acquired through mergers run entirely separate software stacks that were never designed to speak to each other, let alone to a distributed ledger. Core banking migrations at large institutions are measured in years, sometimes decades, and routinely run over budget and behind schedule even when the target system already exists and has been validated. The system being replaced by XRP does not yet exist in production anywhere at meaningful scale.

The loudest voices in the XRP community are, almost without exception, social media commentators, YouTube presenters, and retail investors. The absence of credible financial infrastructure professionals from this cohort is not a coincidence. The friction in global payments is not a bug that banks forgot to fix. It is a revenue line, a compliance layer, a legal structure, and in many cases a deliberate sovereign policy instrument. It will not be resolved by a token, a press release, or a prediction from someone who has never been near a Wall Street toilet, never mind the floors above it.

For XRP to fulfil its stated role as the global settlement layer, sovereign nations — including China, Russia, the EU, India, Brazil, and the entire Global South — would need to route their cross-border financial flows through infrastructure controlled by Ripple Labs: a private company incorporated in San Francisco, regulated under US law, subject to US presidential executive orders, and answerable to US courts.

This is not a technical problem. It is a geopolitical one — and it is existential for the thesis. The US government has already demonstrated, repeatedly, its willingness to weaponise financial infrastructure: SWIFT access was severed for Russia within days of a policy decision. Tornado Cash was sanctioned. Iranian banking has been excluded for decades. One OFAC designation, one executive order, and XRP's "global" payment rail becomes an American toll road that half the world's sovereign treasuries are constitutionally prohibited from using.

The EU is building its own payment infrastructure specifically to reduce dollar dependency. China operates CIPS as a deliberate SWIFT alternative. India's UPI has onboarded hundreds of millions of users on sovereign rails. The Global South is actively seeking payment systems that are not subject to Washington's foreign policy preferences. The idea that all of these actors will voluntarily route value through a US-domiciled private company — whose token is already subject to SEC litigation — is not a prediction grounded in geopolitical reality. It is an American assumption, made by Americans, who have not considered what the rest of the world's finance ministries actually want.

Ripple Labs holds approximately 4.7 billion XRP directly and has a further estimated 37+ billion in escrow, released in monthly tranches of up to 1 billion tokens. At $10,000 per token, Ripple's direct holdings alone approach $47 billion. Their escrow position at the same price is worth approximately $370 billion. The combined position of Ripple Labs and its founders at Claver's stated target price would make the company's insiders among the wealthiest entities in human history — wealthier than the GDP of most nations. This is the organisation whose promotional narrative the XRP army has adopted as investment thesis.

The second problem is structural. Every month, up to 1 billion XRP tokens are released from escrow into the circulating supply. At the current price of ~$1.37, this represents a $1.37 billion monthly supply injection. At $100 per XRP it becomes a $100 billion monthly injection. At $1,000 it is a trillion dollars of new supply entering the market every month. The higher the price climbs, the greater the dollar value of sell pressure that Ripple can — and commercially must — introduce. Ripple is not a charity. They have employees, investors, and obligations. The escrow exists because they need a mechanism to monetise their position over time.

The escrow is not a feature designed to protect XRP holders. It is a scheduled dilution mechanism, controlled entirely by the same private company that created the token, that releases supply at a pace and timing of their choosing. The XRP army has been told this is prudent token management. It is also, depending on your perspective, the largest overhang in cryptocurrency markets. Every dollar of price appreciation creates a larger incentive for the company that controls the supply to sell it.