XRP Ledger Is A ‘Ghost Chain,’ Chainlink Community Liaison Claims

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A fresh clash between XRP critics and defenders broke out on X after Chainlink Community Liaison Zach Rynes (@ChainLinkGod) argued that the XRP investment thesis has failed to keep pace with how crypto markets and financial infrastructure have evolved. His central claim was blunt: the XRP Ledger is now a “ghost chain,” while the use case once pitched for XRP as a bridge asset has largely been overtaken by stablecoins and broader interoperability infrastructure.

Rynes framed the dispute around what he called the long-running retail thesis behind XRP. “The bizarre retail thesis of XRP is that it will become the global reserve currency that everything trades against, the so-called ‘XRP standard,’” he wrote. “Rather than trading Dollars for Euros directly, you would trade USD for XRP, and then XRP for EUR, because this makes payments supposedly more efficient.”

He argued that XRP supporters prefer to describe this not as a bid for reserve-currency status, but as a narrower “bridge currency” role. In his view, that distinction does not materially change the argument. He said the larger problem is that the market structure envisioned by early XRP advocates was built in other ways over the past decade.

“The XRP vision was created over a decade ago before we had modern 200K TPS high-throughput chains, programmable smart contracts, DeFi protocols, fiat-backed stablecoins, tokenized deposits, atomic DvP/PvP swaps, and cross-chain infra,” Rynes wrote. “If you listen to what the world’s largest financial institutions and market infrastructures like Swift, DTCC, JP Morgan, BlackRock, and many others are saying, you’ll find zero of them talking about the need for a ‘bridge currency.’ Rather, they talk about the need for connectivity, interoperability, privacy, compliance, and orchestration.”

That critique extended to XRP Ledger’s position in tokenization and on-chain finance. Rynes said XRPL “will become the dominant chain for tokenized real world assets” remains a popular belief among XRP holders despite what he described as weak adoption metrics. He called XRPL “a ghost chain with less than 1% RWA market share and under 0.01% of stablecoins,” arguing that this makes the idea of XRPL emerging as the primary settlement layer difficult to defend.

He also pointed to stablecoins as the practical winner in the bridge-asset debate. According to Rynes, “USD-backed stablecoins have become the dominant crypto-native ‘bridge currency’ for payments, trading, and finance,” and the industry has already built “everything XRP was supposed to be, without XRP.” He cited Hyperliquid as an example of crypto-native finance where positions across multiple markets are effectively denominated against dollar-backed stablecoins rather than XRP.

The second half of his argument focused less on ledger design and more on Ripple’s business model. Rynes alleged that Ripple “socializes its costs to XRP holders and privatizes gains for its equity shareholders,” saying XRP sales fund products whose revenue accrues to Ripple rather than directly to token holders. He made the same point about RLUSD, writing that around 90% of its supply sits on Ethereum and other chains, which in his telling creates little to no direct demand for XRP itself.

XRP Community Fires Back

Not everyone in the thread accepted that framing. XRP advocate and lawyer Bill Morgan pushed back on Rynes’ comparison between token buybacks and equity buybacks, calling it “a false equivalence because a token is nothing like a share and has no rights attached it like a share.” He also rejected the idea that Ripple and XRPL should be treated as one and the same, writing that “Ripple does not own the XRPL which is a fully decentralised public permissionless Blockchain.”

Morgan argued that Ripple had opted for a different structure through Evernorth, which he described as an independent vehicle designed to acquire XRP and offer institutions regulated exposure. He said that model was preferable to Ripple itself running a reserve that could draw regulatory scrutiny, especially given how the SEC previously pointed to Ripple’s efforts to support XRP’s price in litigation.

At press time, XRP traded at $1.4757.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

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