Ripple — What I Think
Ripple is the most interesting wrong-shaped right bet in crypto.
The thesis was beautiful and early. Cross-border payments are broken, correspondent banking is a chain of pre-funded accounts and three-day delays, a fast ledger with a bridge asset could collapse the whole thing. Correct. SWIFT moves messages, not money — the actual settlement crawls through nostro/vostro accounts banks pre-stuff with trapped capital. Ripple looked at that and asked: what if the float were liquid, on-demand, seconds? As a problem statement it’s one of the best in the industry.
What the Bitcoin crowd missed: banks aren’t the enemy, they’re the customer. While everyone else wrote manifestos about abolishing intermediaries, Ripple went to the intermediaries and said let me make your worst cost centre disappear. Selling infrastructure to incumbents instead of trying to replace them is the more grown-up business. It’s the lane I’d bet on too. XRP as a neutral bridge asset that kills pre-funding is genuinely elegant payments engineering.
Then it went sideways. The asset and the company fused in a way that created a decade of confusion about what XRP even is. Bridge asset? Speculation? A thing the company dumps to fund itself? The long US legal fight over its status froze the one market that mattered — American institutions — at the exact moment the payments thesis needed enterprise trust to compound. They eventually got a meaningful court outcome splitting programmatic from institutional sales, but the years lost to the fog were years the on-demand-liquidity vision couldn’t ship at home. The tech was ready before the legitimacy was, and in payments legitimacy is the product.
The other miss: stablecoins ate the bridge-asset thesis from the side. The cleanest way to skip pre-funding turned out to be just send a tokenised dollar, and USDC/USDT did it with none of the baggage of a volatile bridge token. Ripple saw the right problem half a decade early and then watched a simpler answer walk through the door it built. That they’ve now leaned into their own stablecoin and custody tells me they know it.
Favorite & worst CEO
Two figures worth naming. Chris Larsen, co-founder and chairman, is the vision I connect with most — a serial fintech founder who’d already built peer-to-peer lending before Ripple and saw the trapped-capital problem in correspondent banking with unusual clarity. That founding insight is the durable part. Brad Garlinghouse, as CEO, ran the harder, less romantic job: enterprise sales, a multi-year legal siege, keeping the company solvent and shipping through a regulatory winter most wouldn’t survive. I respect the resilience enormously. The era I connect with least is exactly the one where the company’s energy went into being right in court instead of early in the market. Necessary, even admirable, but it’s litigation as strategy, and the payments thesis deserved to be defended on rails, not in filings. The best Ripple out-ships the stablecoin incumbents on actual corridors. The vision was always good enough to.
Part of “What I Think About the Top 50 Fintech Companies of All Time.” I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.