BLACKROCK DROPS XRP BOMBSHELL – MUCH HIGHER IS COMING

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]BlackRock just made a giant announcement. Every single thing they own is heading on chain. I also pulled together a few clips around XRP and where the price might land once real money starts flowing through the network. On top of that, the team running Ripple shares their take on where stablecoins are heading and why RLUSD lines up so nicely for both Wall Street players and regular people. And I grabbed a few moments from Charles Hoskinson where he gets into agentic AI and the kind of opportunities it's about to open up. Plenty of alpha waiting for you here, so let me roll the BlackRock clip first. Honestly, for digital assets, this is a pinch-me kind of moment. Give it a listen. Now, BlackRock's doing a lot with tokenization. They have their BUIDL fund. They're invested in securitize. Do you see them tokenizing ETFs or is that a bit further down the line?

[00:00:52]>> yeah, they're definitely going to be tokenizing ETFs. They're going to be tokenizing everything. Larry Fink is very bullish on tokenization. If you listen to all the words he said, he was also extremely bullish on ESG and ESG narratives and stuff, and he's very much walked that back, so we got to be careful about what we're saying here, but tokenization of ETFs is happening now already. It just makes sense. I have some questions about how the underlying plumbing is going to work. I think long-term you're going to see all stocks are going to be tokenized. There's some questions to be had about like making markets in those products and different things along those lines, so like trading in the old way, TradFi, trading on DeFi crypto rails, tokenizing underlying assets, but eventually you get to a point where like an ETF is just a smart contract and it's holding the tokens of the underlying equities that are in that smart contract or that index it's tracking, but that's probably a decade away. If all goes on the path that we're currently heading on or barreling towards, I think that's where things go. And BlackRock is a believer in doing this, and we have other ETF issuers doing this. Even FM Investments is a fixed-income ETF company. They've already filed to tokenize their Treasury Bill ETFs. Yeah, I mean, it's happening.

[00:01:50]It's going to happen.

[00:01:51]>> The latest chatter is that BlackRock will start moving their ETFs on chain in a window stretching from 3 months out to about a year from now. Globally, they manage close to 5 trillion and around 3.6 trillion of that is parked in ETF space in America. Products like IBIT fall right into that bucket. Something else worth flagging here, BlackRock is already cooperating with businesses connected to Ripple on tokenizing a handful of funds. BlackRock's build a fund can't be swapped 24/7 with Ripple's RLU SD. On top of that, agreements with Securitize are wired straight into XRP Once that is live, capital coming from BlackRock can settle on the ledger riding the same tracks. And between you and me, a bunch of details are likely still behind closed doors while folks across social media spin up their own predictions. Throughout this video, I'm sticking strictly to what's been confirmed. Slotting this clip in at this point made sense to me given that our whole focus today is tokenization and the way it's going to shake things up for everybody watching.

[00:02:52]When tokenizing economies, real-world assets and global payments fully migrate to digital rails, value won't be so scattered. It'll concentrate just like it did when the dollar became the world's reserve currency.

[00:03:06]XRP was architected to sit at the center of that consolidation as a neutral bridge asset for global liquidity and settlement.

[00:03:15]That's why the price must be significantly higher for XRP to efficiently handle trillions in daily cross-border flows without massive slippage and market disruption.

[00:03:27]Its unit price needs to be high enough that only a small number of tokens are required to move an enormous amount of money.

[00:03:35]So, the higher price creates the necessary depth for and liquidity.

[00:03:43]That's liquidity mathematics under constrained supply and exploding demand.

[00:03:49]At $5 or even $50, XRP can achieve its own objective to function as the primary settlement layer for tokenized global economy.

[00:03:59]The math will demand a much higher price for it to operate at scale as it would design for them. That's the real utility thesis.

[00:04:09]Most people still don't seem to understand at this point.

[00:04:12]It's clear that most people won't understand it until it's too late.

[00:04:17]Please pay attention to this clip.

[00:04:20]If you look at Ripple their own history, it reflects this ambition because remember when their website openly discussed XRP to become a global reserve liquidity instrument. They said a global reserve currency. That means they built the technology to tokenize value, streamline cross-border flows, and eventually migrate all the money in the world into the new financial architecture. When you look at today's financial infrastructure, it's fundamentally broken in my view. We're trapped in an unsustainable debt cycle that forces endless money printing just to keep the lights on. The economies all over the world are suffering. Countries worldwide are actively looking at alternatives to the dollar-centric system tied to the military-industrial complex. And when you start to look at XRP again, its purpose was built for this moment. We're talking about a neutral, fast, cheap, and scalable technology that eliminates the need for the corresponding banking system and that frees up trapped capital that's in these nostro-vostro accounts we talked about this.

[00:05:20]So, the high price of XRP wasn't about the numbers going up. It was really about creating enough depth and liquidity for XRP to handle the volume of global settlement layers, okay?

[00:05:31]Um So, what I'm trying to say is that no way in hell that XRP can accomplish its own objective lingering at five bucks, 10 bucks, $100 even. It has to be at a high price to function as the reserve asset it was designed to.

[00:05:47]And here's the reality most still refuse to understand or see.

[00:05:51]Is that we're we're talking about the structural revaluation of global liquidity. Just as value concentrated into the dollar and that's what made the dollar the world reserve currency, value is now concentrating into other assets that move liquidity and settlement most efficiently. And that is exactly what XRP is. So when you think about a tokenized economy, which is the very definition of what 2030 is all about, when you talk about real world assets, when you talk about global payments that are fully migrating into the digital rails, that's not going to be scattered.

[00:06:25]I'm very sorry to tell you this. It's going to consolidate and for that to happen, XRP is architected to be the center of that shift. That means it needs a higher price to function. I'm still convinced that this is going to be realized in due time.

[00:06:40]And I think when it does, it's going to be too late for most retail investors to ever again have the kind of exposure that they have to XRP right now. The $300 billion stablecoin market is just the beginning. Ripple's Lauren Belive breaks down why the next 10X will be driven by institutional adoption with the genius act providing the regulatory roadmap.

[00:07:01]RLUSD is becoming the crown jewel for banks looking for instant 24/7 settlement. Give a listen to this.

[00:07:10]Briefly introduce yourselves and then we'll jump right in with some questions.

[00:07:13]But Lauren, I will start with you.

[00:07:15]Thank you and I'm so pleased to be here.

[00:07:17]My name is Lauren Belive and I'm the global co-head of policy for Ripple.

[00:07:22]Turn to you and and what do you make of this discussion around bank deposits and the risk of flight? And is there another contrarian view that actually this could benefit banks in the long run? Oh, I I think this is an excellent question and I'll pick up where Robin left off. I I think the narrative that has come around is that it it a zero-sum um issue and it is really not the case.

[00:07:44]And so, I want to zoom out to the macro level here. How does the movie end? The movie ends and I and I think it it's specific from the Ripple perspective.

[00:07:53]Ripple is a 13-year-old company. We're mature in the crypto asset space. We build digital asset infrastructure for B2B platforms. So, our banks are institutions. They're financial institutions. They're big banks. They're fintechs. They're governments. They're corporations. And we have a whole suite of products for them. Um, we do cross-border payments. We allow for custody. We have a prime brokerage that manages trading both crypto and traditional finance, as well as doing some treasury and liquidity management.

[00:08:21]But, one of the crown jewels of our stack for clients is we've launched our own RLUSD stablecoin. Um, and it's a really great opportunity for traditional finance to take advantage of the stablecoin and the rails that they they work. It's 24-hour. It's instant settlements. There's um, great collateral against stablecoins. Um, and it's it's an an immediate kind of liquidity that banks can use that's a cash equivalent. Um, so that it's not going to be a big bang theory overnight.

[00:08:51]And I think there were some really consequential blockers. The lack of knowledge, the lack of access to stablecoins, and frankly, the lack of regulatory certainty, which we now have with the genius act. And because all of those blockers have been coming down, we are starting to see traditional finance truly come to the table. Um, and it you know, at first it is retail payment processing, cross-border payments. But, as soon as people can see that this will also be good collateral for their cash equivalents in their bottom line, you're going to have a real moment where traditional finance and how the movie ends is it's going to be integrated very seamlessly into not just what big banks are are using for their business, but how the end user is affected. And so, what's happening right now I think is in a moment in time, but if we start looking at the scale of how stable coins is going to be integrated, it will be prudent for traditional finance to come to the the table and want to give these benefits to their consumers. So, really exciting opportunity. So, you know, recently we're starting to have more debate and discussion about various types of non-bank entities seeking banking-like charters uh and potential access to Fed master accounts or the Fed payment system.

[00:10:06]Share some thoughts on that. How important is that to the ecosystem? Is that a logical next step or do you see that as a distinct conversation?

[00:10:14]Lauren, I'm happy to start with you.

[00:10:15]>> Absolutely. I think when we talk about what's going to be a needle mover here, right? I you know, you look at the stablecoin industry right now, it's about 314 billion in market cap. I think the first zero to 314 billion really was driven by retail investments, by crypto investments, but that next 10x going forward, I believe is really going to be driven by institutional engagement and institutional investments. That's the shift and that's the opportunity for stablecoin going forward. Now, as I mentioned, Ripple, our clients are big banks and for us, we are a regulatory regulation-heavy first company. Um when we went to start our stablecoin, we went through New York DFS, um which is the the largest the third largest regulator in the country under the Fed and the OCC. And now, we've also sought a OCC charter, which we um were approved for. And a lot of that is if you're going to be engaging with banking partners, um most of them haven't had much exposure to stablecoin counterparties because they weren't regulated yet before. And so, those entities now, through the Genius Act, through going through, I would say, very tough regulatory scrutiny of New York DFS, and we enjoy our relationship with them, that's the baseline to really establishing trust through a lot of these banking um work partnerships and that is what now that and the genius act itself you know that it had it you need to have one-to-one dollar backed you need to have a proof of reserves there's a lot of heavy AML scrutiny that goes in through the genius act and there's bankruptcy protections so that eliminates a lot of that risk that the banks are feeling and so now it makes sense that there's access points that the OCC can properly regulate these entities that are really above board.

[00:12:01]One thing I really want to drive home is this. Inside the United States, if you're running a financial institution, you've got to be partnering with outfits like Ripple. Especially when those outfits are going through the New York Department of Financial Services to get their stable coin approved. Just stop and think about it for a second. Would you actually plug an offshore stable coin into your infrastructure and put your whole operation at legal risk? Or would you go with one that people view as a top-tier choice for institutional purposes? That's exactly why I believe XRP and RLUSD have so much room to grow over the next 5 to 10 years. Picture yourself at BlackRock or DTCC for a minute. Are you really going to drop Tether into your infrastructure today?

[00:12:46]Or are your eyes much more likely on Ripple or Circle? To me, the answer practically writes itself. And the same logic applies to pretty much every big or mid-size financial player getting into the stable coin game. If launching your own isn't on the table, you're going to partner with whoever sits at the top of the pile. Check this second part of the same clip.

[00:13:09]Ripple's very focused on financial institutions and the institutionalization of digital assets.

[00:13:16]Tell us about the interplay. Like do you see the tokenized deposits as a good base layer and then where do stable coins play? How are your customers or clients using the technology? No, absolutely.

[00:13:27]I and I I think it's really important to note that um Well, so I think it it is a very good base layer. I think people think about different tokens for different use cases. So, a lot of people are holding and investing into Bitcoin. Bitcoin is really a savings token. Ripple utilizes a token called the XRP token. That is a utility token. It was made to do cross-border payments. It was used to be able to utilize the RLUSD, which is also its own stable coin. That's also a utility spending tool. And that is it is a very strong base layer um to be able to then look at why people are using it.

[00:14:04]And then what is it generate for the end user? And I think that's something that we haven't really talked about yet on this panel is you do you have banks and institutions, but who's at the end of all of that? There are 55 million Americans right now, one in five Americans that are holding and using crypto. They're equally divided by political party, they are equally divided across the country regionally, and they're going to start going to their banks or they're going to start going to their Coinbase apps and wallets. And it's not just a holding or savings technique anymore, but it is it's about how are they using that utility at the end? And that's where I think the banks are going to be coming around and looking to be um really really innovative in terms of how they're serving their their customers.

[00:14:48]This is very well said. I I'm sorry, I'll just be quick.

[00:14:52]One of the advantages of these different mechanisms is they serve different financial goals for the consumer, for the business, etc. The advantage of tokenization, a tokenized deposit, is it brings money into the bank as opposed to the money being used for other purpose outside the bank. And bringing it into the bank as a deposit is important because those deposits at the end of the day support lending in the United States.

[00:15:20]And and critically important for the well-being of commerce. So, different different strokes for different folks. I think they can all live we can all live together and really serve the American public in the best possible way. Look, the backing you all show me genuinely keeps this thing going.

[00:15:39]Wishing you the best until we link up again. Got a little love to spare for the channel? Tap that thumbs up, fire off a comment, or shoot this video over to someone in your circle. Take care.

[00:15:50]See you in the next upload.