The Biggest Mistake XRP Haters Keep Making About Ripple’s Business Model

A long-running criticism of XRP is back in focus again: the idea that Ripple sells XRP to fund traditional businesses, implying the token itself is secondary to the company’s ambitions. According to analyst Cryptoinsightuk, that framing misses a key part of how Ripple actually operates, and why XRP remains central to its long-term strategy. In a recent post, Cryptoinsightuk argued that XRP critics are “so close to being right,” but fail to understand the direction of causality. Ripple does monetize some XRP, but not because it wants to replace the asset with real-world companies or legacy infrastructure. Instead, those moves are designed to strengthen the ecosystem that makes XRP more useful and, over time, more valuable. The distinction matters. Ripple holds a large XRP balance, estimated at roughly 40% of total supply when including escrow. If XRP succeeds as a global settlement asset, that holding could eventually outweigh the company’s entire traditional balance sheet. In that context, XRP is not treated as operating cash. It functions more like a strategic reserve. As Cryptoinsightuk put it, selling the most asymmetric asset on the balance sheet just to accumulate “normal companies” would make little sense. Ripple’s approach appears to be the opposite. Traditional assets, licenses, infrastructure, and partnerships are used as tools to increase the necessity of XRP within regulated financial rails.

People who hate $XRP are so close to being right, so close. But they miss one key step to their equation.

Haters say Ripple sell $XRP so they can buy real-world companies and assets, because that’s how Ripple “makes money”.

In my opinion, that completely misunderstands the…

— Cryptoinsightuk (@Cryptoinsightuk) December 31, 2025

This helps explain why Ripple has focused heavily on payments infrastructure, liquidity venues, custody services, stablecoins, and compliance frameworks. These components are not substitutes for XRP. They are enablers. Each one lowers friction for institutions that might eventually rely on XRP for cross-border settlement. The same logic applies to Ripple’s acquisitions and integrations. When Ripple works with firms tied to institutional trading, treasury management, or stablecoin issuance, the end goal is not diversification away from XRP. Those businesses act as multipliers. They expand liquidity access, improve trust, and increase throughput across systems where a neutral bridge asset becomes useful. Critics often frame XRP sales as dilution. But within this model, XRP monetization functions more like capital deployment. Limited sales fund infrastructure that feeds back into the network, increasing the conditions under which XRP can be used at scale. If institutional adoption grows, long-term demand may matter far more than short-term supply increases. Importantly, this does not guarantee price appreciation. Execution risk remains high, and timelines are long. Institutional adoption moves slower than retail speculation, and regulatory clarity is still evolving across jurisdictions. XRP’s price action over the past few years reflects those constraints. Still, Cryptoinsightuk’s point highlights why the common “Ripple sells XRP to survive” narrative falls short. Ripple’s strategy only makes sense if XRP remains architecturally central. The company’s focus on neutral settlement, regulated rails, and global liquidity would be unnecessary if XRP were merely a funding source. In that light, Ripple’s endgame is not about cashing out of XRP. It is about building systems where XRP becomes difficult to ignore. Whether that strategy succeeds remains an open question, but the business model is more internally consistent than critics often admit. Read also: Expert Sells His XRP Bag—And Everything Since Has Proven Him Right