XRP (XRP 1.55%), now hovering just below $1.50, deserves credit for having genuine utility in a market filled with meme coins and outright frauds. Created by Ripple, the token was designed to enable faster, cheaper transactions between financial institutions, especially across borders.

Partnerships with major banks, like Bank of America and Santander, show Ripple is doing something right.

So, where will XRP be in five years?

There’s a key difference in Ripple’s products

The bull case has always been simple: The banking system’s adoption of Ripple’s technology will drive XRP demand. But in my view, this misunderstands how banks actually use — or don’t use — Ripple’s products.

Ripple offers two core products. Though they’ve been recently unified as features under the umbrella of “Ripple Payments,” I’ll use their former names for clarity.

RippleNet is a settlement system that allows for faster and cheaper transactions, improving on legacy systems. But it is essentially a messaging service, and banks typically use it without ever touching XRP. This is the service the big-name banks like Bank of America have experimented with or adopted.

On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), on the other hand, actually uses XRP as a “bridge asset” for cross-border transactions. When, say, sending funds from a bank in the U.S. to a bank in France, ODL converts the dollars to XRP and then into euros.

Bulls argue that growing ODL adoption will drive demand for XRP, but this doesn’t hold up — at least enough to move the needle — for two reasons:

1. ODL serves smaller institutions facing liquidity constraints like fintechs and remittance providers, not major banks. It’s a relatively niche product that caps transaction volume growth.
2. Institutions immediately convert in and out of XRP. Each buy order is instantly matched with a sell order, meaning the bulk of global volume doesn’t create any sustained demand.

Stablecoins could pose a threat

And there’s another wrinkle: Stablecoins have quickly found a footing within traditional finance and banking systems, making them more efficient while providing more stability than XRP. And with recent legislation, their role within the system is only likely to grow.

Ripple recognizes this. That’s why Ripple has undergone a rebranding and made several key acquisitions, including the $200 purchase of RAIL. It’s clear Ripple wants its own stablecoin, RLUSD, to be a major player in the industry. Ripple’s own website now prominently features “integrate stablecoin payments into your business.”

That’s a problem for XRP’s value. RLUSD can function as an alternative bridge asset in ODL transactions and erode its already limited demand pressure.

Is XRP a buy going forward?

In five years, Ripple will likely be a thriving payments infrastructure company, even more so than today. RLUSD will probably have gained meaningful traction as a bridge asset for cross-border transfers.

But even if Ripple’s products genuinely transform cross-border banking, I don’t think XRP holders will benefit from it. In five years, I see it having struggled to keep up with the rest of the market — or worse.

That’s according to a report Sunday (Feb. 15) from Coindesk, which characterizes this development as part of the Elon Musk-headed social media platform’s widening push into the financial services space.

The new features will include “Smart Cashtags,” the report added, citing comments from Nikita Bier, X’s head of product. These will let users interact with ticker symbols in posts and carry out trades from the app.

As Coindesk noted, the announcement is happening as the company is preparing to launch an external beta of its payments system. Musk said X Money is being tested in-house and will be available to a limited user group within a month or two.

Musk has touted this as part of his vision for X becoming an “everything app,” allowing users to manage the bulk of their digital activity from one platform.

“You’ll be able to come to X and be able to transact your whole financial life on the platform,” former X CEO Linda Yaccarino told the Financial Times last year.

“And that’s whether I can pay you for the pizza that we shared last night or make an investment or a trade. So that’s the future.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote last month about the way AI-powered smart agents presented a challenge to super apps like Uber’s blend of food, groceries, mobility, payments and ride-hailing, as well offerings from banks and retailers.

“Across all of these models, the promise to the consumer was convenience. The benefit to the Super App operator was control,” Webster wrote. “Smart Agents break that compact.”

Agents can function across many merchants and platforms at the same time, with the organizing principle shifting from the platform’s ecosystem to the consumer’s intent. In a world governed by Super Apps, discovery is driven by the platform’s priorities, pricing transparency is limited, and the cost of switching is steep.

“In an agentic world, the agent’s job is to search broadly, compare honestly, and execute efficiently on the user’s behalf,” Webster wrote. “And it’s all guided by preferences and constraints set by the consumer, not by a single platform’s business model. That makes the Super Agent the new front door.”

As a first-year computer science student in Hanoi, Hoang Le started trading cryptocurrency from his university dorm room, egged on by his gamer friends who were making a killing.

But they crashed to zero when the bottom fell out of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in recent months.

Getting wiped out “hurt a lot”, he said, but he also learned a valuable lesson: he has come to think of the losses as “tuition fees”.

“When profits were high, everyone became greedy,” said Le, now 23, adding that “it was too good to be true”.

Unlike neighbouring China, which has banned cryptocurrencies outright, communist Vietnam has allowed blockchain technology to develop in a legal grey area – barring its use for payments but letting people speculate unimpeded.