Ripple’s Great Transformation: From Speculative Asset to Core of Financial Infrastructure > News

The goal of ‘achieving $1 billion in annual sales without selling XRP’ presented by Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has significant implications for the market. This is a strong expression of Ripple's will to break away from a structure that relies on the value of tokens held by Ripple and complete its own profit model as a software and financial infrastructure company. In fact, the transaction volume of Fortune 500 companies using Ripple’s prime brokerage service and payment network has already exceeded $100 billion. These numbers prove that Ripple is no longer a place to sell vague expectations, but has evolved into a reliable payment infrastructure that real businesses adopt to reduce costs and improve speed.

On the other hand, the debate among investors linking the value of XRP and the scalability of the network is still ongoing. As Ripple's early design documents are being revisited, expectations are rising that the value of XRP as a utility asset will rise as network usage increases. However, market experts caution that these correlations must be backed by actual network adoption rates to ensure they are not simply a legacy of the past. Currently, XRP is continuously knocking on the threshold of institutionalization, including being incorporated into the ETF product group where institutional investors' funds flow, which means that it is changing from an individual investor-centered market to a more robust institutional-centered ecosystem.

The movements of Ripple’s stablecoin, RLUSD, are also an interesting point to watch. According to recent data, RLUSD has been in a net burn phase with more burns than issuance, but this does not mean that business is slowing down. Rather, Ripple is expanding its influence to the multi-chain environment through cooperation with the Wormhole Project and is aggressively expanding real-world use cases, including being included in the payment infrastructure of large financial companies such as Mastercard. Partnerships with Turkish financial companies and university research support programs are interpreted as a stepping stone for RLUSD to go beyond a simple digital currency and establish itself as a standard for cross-border, institutional-level payments and settlements.

External variables surrounding the market are also key factors in determining Ripple’s long-term direction. The recovery in preference for risky assets due to expectations of a peace agreement between the United States and Iran has injected short-term vitality into the altcoin market, including Ripple. However, from a macroeconomic perspective, the U.S. Federal Reserve's monetary policy and whether the legal dispute with the SEC is resolved are decisive variables that will determine the mid- to long-term fate of XRP. Rather than obsessing over short-term breakthroughs on the charts, experts advise that we should pay attention to how deeply Ripple penetrates into the institutional financial infrastructure in compliance with ISO 20022, the global interbank payment standard.