Major Wall Street investors poured $500 million into Ripple in 2025 – a figure that reflects how embedded XRP has become in the company’s financial backbone and why analysts believe Ripple has no reason to move away from it.
A recent widely circulated academic article, published in Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research, argues that XRP’s role in Ripple’s cross-border payments network makes abandonment not only unlikely but structurally complex. The newspaper drew wider attention to this topic XRP community researcher SMQKE.
The case against breaking ties
Ripple Payments – Formerly known as RippleNet — uses XRP as a bridge asset to move money across borders quickly and cheaply. According to the article, this relationship is deep. XRP helps protect against the risk of double spending while reducing the latency that plagues customary payment systems.
Banks such as Bank of America and Santander are among the financial institutions connected to the Ripple network. Reports suggest that this type of institutional footprint makes a sudden shift away from XRP a complicated proposition.
‼️ WHY RIPPLE WILL NEVER LEAVE XRP ‼️
Read carefully.😶🌫️
“Since RippleNet DEPENDS heavily on XRP, XRP will co-exist with Ripple Labs.”✅
“This way, as long as Ripple Labs is widely used in its real-time cross-border payments business, the XRP market will ALWAYS function as… pic.twitter.com/9YZvBLoExt
— SMQKE (@SMQKEDQG) March 13, 2026
The newspaper does not claim that XRP is untouchable. He points to tightening regulations and competing technologies as real threats that may change the way Ripple operates in the long run. Still, the main conclusion is that XRP and Ripple are likely to remain linked for the foreseeable future.
XRP’s broader ambitions
In addition to payments, Ripple has considered positioning XRP as a neutral intermediary for central bank digital currencies, i.e CBDC. The idea is that XRP could connect various national digital currencies without the parties having to rely on customary financial intermediaries.
This ambition signals something vital. Ripple does not treat XRP as a legacy product that should be quietly phased out. Reports indicate that the company is actively expanding its applications rather than eliminating them.
CEO Brad Garlinghouse has publicly described XRP as the company’s guiding goal. His exact words, often repeated in the XRP community: “XRP is our north star.”
The launch of Stablecoin adds a recent layer
Ripple launch RLUSDits own stablecoin, has fueled speculation that XRP may be sidelined. Some observers read the move as a sign that Ripple is hedging its bets with a more stable asset.
Ripple executives backed away from this interpretation. They maintain that XRP is not being replaced – that RLUSD works alongside it, not instead of it.
The scientific article largely supports this position. It recognizes that XRP is critical to both network security and overall system performance, rather than as a phasing out technology. It remains an open question whether this will happen as stablecoins gain traction in the broader payments industry.
Featured image from Pexels, chart from TradingView
