After the $100 million lawsuit, XRP does not want to be a "cult coin" anymore

Author:Peggy , BlockBeats

On June 12, decentralized asset management platform Trident announced the launch of an XRP treasury financing program up to $500 million and hired Chaince Securities LLC as a strategic consultant.

Against the backdrop of a decline in retail investors' enthusiasm and a cooling of community discussions, this news has caused market attention: Why are there still institutions choosing to allocate large amounts of XRP as an on-chain reserve asset? Does this mean that the retail camp, once known as the "XRP Army", is gradually being replaced by institutional funds?

XRP is one of the earliest blockchain projects to enter the public eye, but it has also been labeled as "centralization", "stolen lawsuits" and "lack of innovation" for a long time. The tug-of-war lawsuit with the SEC lasted for five years, with slowing technology iteration and weak sense of community participation, making it a representative of "old-era projects." However, since 2024, XRP's ecosystem has quietly turned: prices have approached historical highs again, XRPL has built infrastructure around side chains, stablecoins and DeFi modules, and corporate buying and development investment has gradually recovered. Although these changes are not noisy, substantial progress is accumulating on multiple indicators.

This is not a "popular" narrative counterattack, but a structural reconstruction completed with low attention. This article will start from capital trends, ecological evolution and on-chain data to observe how XRP takes the second path of "neither hot nor extinct" between controversy and silence.

XRP is "turning over"?

Strategic buying: Who is buying XRP?

While the mainstream narrative has not been updated yet, real-world funding options are offering another answer. Although XRP's image of "old coins" in the crypto community has not yet left the market, the flow of funds in reality has quietly shifted.

In the past year, this project, which has long been regarded as a "centralized heritage", has not fallen into demise. On the contrary, its price has been stable around US$2, maintaining a pressure resistance in multiple rounds of market pullbacks. At the end of 2024, XRP's market value once exceeded USDT, returning to the top three crypto assets in the world; on-chain TVL also grew from less than 10 million US dollars to more than 40 million US dollars during the same period.

At the same time, a group of institutions began to reevaluate XRP's asset attributes and include them in the scope of medium- and long-term allocation. On May 30, Hong Kong technology company Webus International launched a $300 million financing plan to use XRP for global payment systems. The next day, VivoPower, a listed energy company in Nasdaq, announced the completion of a private equity financing of US$121 million to build an asset reserve mechanism with XRP as the core, led by Saudi royals and consulted by Ripple ecological executives. On June 12, Trident DAO launched a $500 million XRP treasury program to incorporate it into an on-chain governance and asset-linked tool.

These practical cases from the fields of energy, transportation and Web3 finance together show that companies' perception of XRP is no longer stuck to controversial labels or market narratives, but are gradually viewed as a realistic option for "weak volatility digital assets." Especially in the context of the SEC regulatory case coming to an end and Ripple has improved its compliance path, the legal uncertainty of XRP has been alleviated, and its low handling fees and high settlement efficiency are also more in line with the needs of cross-border payments and financial allocation.

Although the update on the technology side is still in progress, these financial behaviors have constituted a non-emotional, medium-term planning-oriented asset selection logic. In other words, even if the community remains skeptical, the other side of the market is already redefining its value with actions.

Ecological reconstruction: isn’t just a payment chain anymore?

After being long defined as a "cross-border payment channel", the ecological structure of XRP is undergoing a systematic shift. In the past year, Ripple has successively launched EVM-compatible sidechain and the US dollar stablecoin RLUSD, and has launched developer activities and payment infrastructure cooperation in many countries.

From the initial remittance network, Ripple is evolving into a multi-layer platform covering payments, custody, stablecoins and project incubation, with the goal of providing institutional clients with a complete on-chain financial service stack. As the product structure continues to expand, a number of new protocols built around XRPL have emerged one after another, introducing this traditional public chain into broader scenarios such as on-chain finance, income management and asset governance.

At the end of 2024, Ripple launched EVM sidechain compatible with Ethereum, and gradually expanded XRPL's infrastructure capabilities with the launch of RLUSD stablecoin and the update of main network functions. These initiatives allow XRP to no longer be limited to payment purposes, but to have the potential to carry on-chain financial applications.

Based on these underlying updates, a new on-chain financial structure called "XRPFi" has begun to take shape. Its core goal is to inject new on-chain utility into XRP in the context of the lack of pledge and income mechanisms of the native XRPL chain. Among them, Doppler Finance is one of the most representative projects at present, adopting a dual-path architecture that is parallel to custody and on-chain to provide coin holders with revenue products and asset management interfaces. According to official data, the platform currently has more than US$30 million in TVL, and funds operate through compliant custody channels, allowing users to view asset flow and source of income.

Doppler Finance 's dual-path revenue structure, Picture Source official website

From the perspective of product structure, Doppler's revenue strategy mainly comes from two types of models:

First, structured arbitrage strategies (such as spot-perpetual arbitrage, cross-platform price neutral arbitrage), focusing on "net increase in XRP quantity" rather than pure US dollar returns;

Doppler Finance 's CeDeFi Income Structure

The second is to use XRP collateral to obtain stablecoins and then deploy them to the high-liquid DeFi protocol to achieve low leverage risk-controllable returns. At the same time, its platform also supports staking income on the Root Network, the upcoming XRPL lending agreement, and one-click staking leverage tool to lower the threshold for user participation.

XRPfi 's income path structure in the on-chain ecosystem

In addition to Doppler, projects such as OnXRP, Magnetic, and Anodos have also appeared on XRPL around AMM and lending. Some of these protocols are deployed on XRPL's EVM sidechains, while others use sidechains such as Root Network for asset mapping. The entire XRPFi ecosystem has not taken the "high TVL sprint" path, but has gradually built a DeFi system that is adapted to the XRP user structure through side chain expansion, compliance interfaces and incentive mechanisms.

According to DefiLlama data, as of June 2025, XRPL's on-chain TVL exceeded US$40 million for the first time, and its funds mainly come from some markets in South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Europe.

From the path, XRP is currently trying a "steering narrative" similar to Tron or Solana - that is, to transform from a payment tool to a base for institutional financial agreements. However, compared with the latter two, XRPL has not abandoned its "low fee, high certainty" compliance orientation, but has achieved expansion with the help of combinable side chains while maintaining the streamlined structure of the main chain.

Although this "technology layering + application division of labor" model is progressing slowly, it is building new application boundaries for XRP and forming an important foundation for the construction of the XRPFi ecosystem.

Not the protagonist, but alive

Despite the ecology gradually expanding, XRP's perception in mainstream communities remains in old impressions. For many crypto-native users, XRP remains a "lack of consensus" project.

This emotional gap is particularly obvious on social platforms. Faced with continuous positive news, some users had no choice but to leave a message, "Stop good news, the currency price has fallen again." This jokey comment captures the current real situation of the XRP community to a certain extent: continuous construction, no emotions rise; structural evolution, and the market is not feeling it.

In short, XRP may not become the narrative center again, nor is it suitable for short-term investors who pursue explosive growth. But it is still being built, still being incorporated into the financial system by institutions, and there are still developers building financial infrastructure here. In an industry where the life cycle of a project is generally no more than five years, "still alive" itself may be scarce enough to be worth a look.