Ripple is using fees earned from XRP to make leveraged bets on stocks—that’s the real news.
The headline is way too understated, but the substance is worth thinking about.
What Ripple is doing now, essentially, is charging fees on the XRP transfer network, using those fees to finance leveraged stock investments, and pocketing the spread. That’s what banks have been doing for decades.
Ripple used to tell the story of being “blockchain infrastructure for cross-border payments.” Now it looks like they’re actually becoming a new kind of bank—with their own rails, fee revenue, and lending business.
While regulators are still battling it out with the SEC, Ripple’s business model has quietly evolved. Has XRP’s narrative shifted from “the coin challenging SWIFT” to “Ripple is the JPMorgan of crypto”? That’s an interesting change.
The headline is way too understated, but the substance is worth thinking about.
What Ripple is doing now, essentially, is charging fees on the XRP transfer network, using those fees to finance leveraged stock investments, and pocketing the spread. That’s what banks have been doing for decades.
Ripple used to tell the story of being “blockchain infrastructure for cross-border payments.” Now it looks like they’re actually becoming a new kind of bank—with their own rails, fee revenue, and lending business.
While regulators are still battling it out with the SEC, Ripple’s business model has quietly evolved. Has XRP’s narrative shifted from “the coin challenging SWIFT” to “Ripple is the JPMorgan of crypto”? That’s an interesting change.