Is Ripple (XRP) Going To $0?

The market is treating XRP less like a payments asset and more like a policy beta that just lost its main catalyst stack. The cleaner read is that the asset’s upside was largely a function of legal overhang removal and exchange re-admission; once that repricing completed, there was no durable fundamental cash-flow anchor to justify a premium multiple versus the major crypto benchmarks. That makes XRP vulnerable to mean reversion whenever crypto risk appetite fades, because there is no embedded staking yield, developer flywheel, or scarcity narrative to mechanically absorb flows.

A more important second-order effect is competitive displacement inside Ripple’s own ecosystem. If the issuer is pushing a dollar-linked rail, it reduces the need for a volatile intermediary in precisely the use case XRP was supposed to own, which means the token can become an increasingly redundant tradable representation of the platform rather than the platform’s utility token. That is structurally bearish for long-duration holders: the base case shifts from “network adoption compounds token demand” to “platform adoption decouples from token demand.”

The bear case is not zero, but a slow bleed lower as liquidity rotates into higher-conviction crypto exposures and speculative capital becomes more selective. The catalyst path back up is narrow: a renewed broad crypto rally, a fresh regulatory surprise, or evidence that XRP actually captures settlement volume that cannot be replicated by stablecoins. Absent that, the next 3-6 months likely favor relative underperformance rather than absolute collapse.

Contrarian view: the market may be overstating the terminal downside because legacy holders and retail flow create a persistent bid that makes true zero difficult. That said, persistence of a floor is not the same as investability; the more relevant trade is that XRP can stay alive while still being a structural loser versus BTC/ETH over the next cycle.