XRP's: Critical do or die moment

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Eight years ago, today was actually the day that XRP flipped Ethereum. And guys, I actually believe there is a large and very high likelihood this is actually going to take place again. This video we're going to talk about the reasons why there's actually a really good chance in the next year XRP will likely have a higher market cap than Ethereum.

[00:00:19]And it goes to one of the core issues on how Ethereum was built. And XRP really doesn't have this issue. Now, it's really important to realize not a lot of people know this. XRP was actually around well before Ethereum. XRP was created as a better Bitcoin and four to five years later, Ethereum then emerged.

[00:00:39]Now, Vitalic, the creator of Ethereum, actually was an intern at Ripple and praised the XRP ledger as being the internet of value and Ethereum just being a compute platform that would be around the internet of value. So the creator of Ethereum Vitalic actually thought and actually saw the vision that XRP would probably be more valuable than Ethereum even though that was what he ended up creating. And that's why for a very long time XRP actually had a higher market cap than Ethereum. So the question is is what changed? Was it a technical reason? Was there some uh very important thing Ethereum was doing that XRP wasn't doing? And the answer is kind of. Now, the big thing that really gave Ethereum the advantage, in my opinion, over something like XRP was just the fact that it had a regulatory head start. Bill Hinnman of the SEC chose to declare that Ethereum, for total BS reasons, as we've learned, was not a security and XRP, that status was still unknown. And because of that, large investors who wanted exposure to the cryptocurrency industry ran to Ethereum to get a secondhand exposure other than just Bitcoin. And those were the only two options. This was really the moment that forced that flip that we saw where XRP was above Ethereum to unravel. And at that artificial regulatory clarity given to Ethereum, Ethereum surpassed XRP. Now, in my opinion, the real reason why that took place was largely because Ethereum just had more potential capital that could go into it. The large institutions were not going to put money into something that didn't have regulatory clarity and the SEC was essentially blessing Ethereum, which allowed a lot of money to go in. Now, I had always maintained the position that Ethereum really didn't do a good job with this regulatory head start. the killer app, the killer idea that Ethereum was supposed to usher in was this idea of DeFi, that smart contracts on Ethereum were going to lead to an explosion of decentralized finance. And that was what Ethereum was going to win on. Now, for a while, it looked like DeFi was in a really, really good place.

[00:02:55]Defi ramped from around 12 billion in total TVL to about 187 billion in about a year. But guys, the story hasn't been as exciting since then. Since then, since the very early days of the DeFi boom, we are yet to really make a significant all-time high in D5 TVL. And even recently, we're kind of dropping off a cliff. Now, for a very, very hard to understand reason, Ethereum has done a very bad job of actually capturing any meaningful economic activity in DeFi. If you take a look at this chart, the biggest thing being used in DeFi right now is 50% of what's being done is just dexes. And another very large percentage is simply lending. These are very very very low value, very easy to replicate activities. And that's most of what DeFi is. The truth is is most of the Ethereum DeFi narrative never really materialized because it wasn't focusing in my opinion on the DeFi that is going to matter.

[00:03:58]What Ethereum did was created a test bed for new applications to build new novels and capabilities that the financial system can't do today. This allowed a lot of very interesting and new innovation to happen on Ethereum. But the truth is is 99% of what created was just junk. 99% of what was created was just memecoins, NFTts, and also just very unrealistic hyperbolic sort of yieldish activity that was really just hyperinflation.

[00:04:29]It's these reasons why Ethereum's DeFi ecosystem is failing. And if you also look at the massive problems that are going on right now with the Ethereum governance, with the actual foundation, with the roadmap for what comes next, Ethereum is just absolutely all over the place. And I believe this is going to open the door for XRP to then once again flip Ethereum. I think a lot of people are really sleeping on the fact that the XRP ledger was created before Ethereum.

[00:04:58]It has better token tokconomics than Ethereum. It has a better road map. It has very concrete use cases and Ripple is driving real DeFi, not the DeFi we saw in Ethereum that was just a really essentially a big casino. What Ripple is doing is working with financial institutions to bring real economic activity on chain. Not trying to recreate a brand new product that offers a magic 15% that no one knows where it comes from or convincing financial institutions that they have to hold JPEGs of a monkey and that's the future of crypto. No, instead taking the trillions of dollars of payment and settlement that these financial institutions are already doing and bringing it on chain. That's how I believe you change the DeFi narrative, right? That's how I believe you get this DeFi number to go absolutely ballistic.

[00:05:46]You actually take the activities that we know financial institutions like to do, right? Very, very simple stuff. moving money, settling payments, very simple cross margin, lending, these very, very simple activities that make up quadrillions of dollars of volume in financial institutions today. You take those activities and you bring them on chain. That is always what Ripple's strategy has been. While the Ethereum strategy is to build new novel things that don't exist. Now, if those new novel things that don't exist being built on Ethereum absolutely explode and are gamechanging and every single person on Earth is doing them and they're the new future of finance, that's a huge win. But so far, what we've seen in terms of TVL, it doesn't tell that story. The TVL chart today for Ethereum tells us that there was a huge amount of excitement in a brand new innovation and ultimately that excitement didn't really materialize into much. It fell off a cliff. there was a new effort to try to get things back going. And that also didn't really perform that well. And now you're in a position where Ethereum's whole thesis was built on this idea that all DeFi was going to be built on ETH and the DeFi is not really getting a lot of traction. I believe that's because the DeFi didn't really have a purpose.

[00:07:01]There was no goal. It was here's this unlimited set of tools. Now go do something with it. And the market didn't actually know what to do with it. Now, that's where I've always made the argument that Ripple is in a much better place because they are actually working with financial institutions that have the activity to lead to a TVL on DeFi in the trillions of dollars. Ripple just needs to help them put that volume on chain, which in my opinion has always been the more sustainable route. You're taking economic activity, you're taking utility that you know exists and just giving it better rails to operate.

[00:07:37]That's why I believe XRPH has a very high likelihood of flipping Ethereum and kind of going back in time and undoing what was a false market flag which was Ethereum getting this regulatory free pass that somehow it was higher quality than something like XRP. Meanwhile, Ethereum never really had a clear road map. The Ethereum Foundation is totally lost in where they see the future of Ethereum. And if you take a look at the failed strategies of the past in terms of millions of layer twos that never materialized into anything, it's hard to even see the direction that Ethereum is going. Now, taking a look at the XRP price chart, I believe we're probably pretty close to this actually taking place, as I alluded to in the beginning of the video. You take a look at XRP right now, it is mimicking a very similar formation to what we saw in 2024 in which XRP ultimately had a little bit more of rattling around down in this consolidation region before taking out to the upside. Now, I believe we are in a very similar pattern right now. This pattern for XRP is a tale as old as time. As I said in the caption here, XRP goes on these long consolidation patterns where it shakes people out.

[00:08:42]People give up on any movement. They get bored ultimately for XRP to rip to the upside so quickly. Most people miss out on 90% of the big move. You can't fall for that trap. It's exactly what XRP does with time. It goes sideways for long periods of time. So people get out of the asset. They forget about it. They go and chase the hype. They go and chase the momentum. Meanwhile, the larger vision of what is being created, the very, very long-term utility being built underneath the plumbing of the biggest financial institutions out there. That's where XRP is going to thrive. It's not going to be a one-time, two week retail FOMO event where everyone's jumping in on the newest application because that's what Ethereum tried to do and it was simply unsustainable.

[00:09:29]What needs to happen, and this is where Ripple has a huge start, is Ripple needs to go get the regulatory licenses, which they have in large part completed. Over 50 state transmitter licenses going for a Federal Reserve master account already regulated under the OC. Take that license, go to the largest financial institutions in the world, and help them take the trillions of sustainable volume they are doing on the outdated rails and bring it to the DeFi rails. That's the difference. Ethereum, Salana, these apps, these chains tried to create something new. They tried to create this brand new financial system and say, you know what, this is going to completely topple the financial system of the past.

[00:10:10]And what we saw was there was a lot of excitement. There was an initial boom, but it never materialized into the actual activity we see in the regulated financial system today. Ripple took a different strategy. He said, "Hey, rather than ignoring the trillions of dollars over here that these financial institutions are going to need to bring on chain, let's work with them. Put that volume on chain and know that we are going to be ushering. Maybe not something that's as exciting as something that didn't exist before, but real LTV that is going to be there that has decades and decades of history in terms of importance. Let's bring that on chain because we know that's actually going to be sustainable. This has always been the long-term plan. This has always been the long-term strategy. And the first time ever, institutional adoption is actually here. I believe this is where the narrative completely flips. We undo the Ethereum free pass and XRP is given a real runway of real volume that makes everything we have seen in the cryptocurrency market look thus far just look like one big experiment. Thank you so much for coming. I hope you enjoyed this update and for now, nickel out.