XRP's Biggest Test Is Adoption, Not Tech, Says Former Ripple Adviser

Anthony Welfare, a former adviser on central bank digital currency at Ripple, told the AllinCrypto Podcast that the XRP Ledger (XRPL) already has the technical features needed for payments and tokenization, and that adoption is the part still unproven. His comments landed in the same week a Ripple-backed vehicle holding roughly 473 million XRP started trading on Nasdaq, putting the asset in front of stock investors with no reason to hold tokens.

What did Anthony Welfare say about the XRP Ledger?

Welfare says the ledger already has what a payments network needs, and that the open question is whether anyone institutional shows up to use it. On the technology side he pointed to quick settlement, very low transaction costs and a decentralized exchange built into the protocol, a combination he considers well suited to moving value and issuing tokenized assets. On the adoption side he said none of those properties decide the result by themselves.

He tied that judgment to his background advising central banks and working on payment projects, where the hard problems rarely involve throughput. Counterparty trust, settlement windows and correspondent banking relationships decide whether a rail gets used, not the transactions per second a protocol can theoretically process. Ledger architecture is a solved problem in his telling. Everything around it is not.

He framed the ledger as one component of a broader rebuild of the payment system rather than a standalone product.

Does the XRP Ledger need XRP to succeed?

No, and that was one of his main points. The XRP Ledger is the network. XRP is the asset that secures it and pays for transaction costs. Institutions can use ledger functions, including tokenized assets and on-chain exchange activity, without holding the token or routing value through it on every transaction, which lets a corporate treasury take settlement rails without taking a directional bet on the asset price.

Ledger use and token demand are separate measurements.

That distinction changes how adoption data gets read. A rise in issued currencies, payment transactions or decentralized exchange volume can reflect corporate and institutional use of the network rather than buying pressure on XRP. It also explains why a bank can be a heavy XRPL user and not an XRP holder, a combination that breaks the older assumption that network success forces token accumulation.

For anyone tracking on-chain metrics, the gap between network activity and token demand is the line worth watching, and most dashboards mix the two together.

The institutional build out: euro stablecoins, RLUSD and Ripple Prime

The past month produced several data points that support a multi-network view of payments. A European consortium is targeting euro stablecoin adoption across several chains, with the XRP Ledger among them, and Europe has been pushing for a regulated euro digital currency in parallel. The IMF mapped the XRP Ledger alongside other public ledgers in its October 2026 Global Financial Stability Report discussion of tokenized finance, which places the network inside the policy conversation rather than at the edge of it.

Ripple has also deepened institutional ties, including Ripple Prime services for Brevan Howard, and an integration with DriveWealth uses Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin on the XRP Ledger to speed up global funding. Each arrangement shows the ledger in a different working role, settlement in one case and funding rails in another, and variety of use is the argument for network effects that do not hang on a single flagship application.

There is a strategic tension underneath the announcement flow. A consortium that issues a euro stablecoin across several networks is partly a hedge against picking one chain, and an issuer selling settlement services into that same market is competing with the networks it supports. Welfare expects stablecoins to lower payment friction and to hand card networks and banks new orchestration roles rather than removing them, so the money sits with whoever organizes the flow.

What did the Evernorth Nasdaq debut show?

The Evernorth listing gave conventional investors a way to own exposure to a large XRP treasury without touching tokens, and its first sessions produced a public price for exactly that idea. Shares opened at $16.68, climbed as high as $19.38, and closed at $16.91 on Monday, October 12. On Wednesday, October 14, XRPN closed at $15.26, down 7.40% on the day, so a vehicle holding roughly 473 million XRP was already trading as a proxy for institutional appetite with no track record behind it.

Wrappers like this one matter because they move price discovery into an equity market that opens and closes on a schedule, carries margin rules, and settles in dollars rather than tokens. That structure brings in buyers who would never touch a spot crypto market, and it also means the ledger's headline asset now has a listed instrument whose volatility comes from equity flows, exchange trading hours and treasury strategy rather than from crypto order books alone.

Welfare calls that a milestone, not proof of final demand. Whether stock market exposure turns into on-chain usage is still an open question.

XRP price and the new Nasdaq proxy

XRP traded near $1.34 in mid-October 2026 and was up 1.72% over the preceding 24 hours, a move that looks ordinary next to the swings in XRPN shares. The gap between token volatility and equity vehicle volatility carries information on its own, since the same view on the asset can now be expressed in two venues with different participants and different hours.

Interoperability beats dominance, in his view.

Welfare also expects demand for audit trails that autonomous software agents can verify, which requires transaction layers trusted enough to serve as proof of what happened. That buyer is not a retail trader reacting to an exchange listing. It is software paying software, which moves the discussion toward agent payments, a category where the ledger's record keeping matters more than the asset used to pay the fee.

Two audiences, one network, different reasons to show up.

What should traders watch next?

Watch private chain deployments first, then the four constraints he named. Welfare expects private blockchains to expand first, with some of that activity later anchoring to public networks. The sequence sets a rough timetable: private deployments generate the use cases, and public rails capture the volume that survives them.

Then track liquidity, custody, compliance and interoperability in that order of difficulty. Liquidity and custody decide whether a treasury can hold and move value on the network at all. Compliance decides whether a regulated institution can sign off on it. Interoperability decides whether the work holds up when it meets other chains, tokenized deposits and central bank money.

Adoption is a plumbing problem before it becomes a price problem.

Risk sits on both sides. If institutional pilots stall, the case for the network weakens no matter how it performs in tests. If they scale, expect competition for liquidity instead of a single winner, since a euro stablecoin consortium working across several networks assumes the XRP Ledger shares the workload. The signing of custody providers, the arrival of named counterparties and the continuation of multi-network stablecoin issuance are the signals worth tracking.