Yesterday, decentralized asset management platform Trident announced the launch of an XRP treasury financing plan of up to US$500 million and hired Chaince Securities LLC as a strategic advisor.

As retail investors’ enthusiasm waned and community discussions cooled, this news attracted market attention: Why do some institutions still choose to allocate large amounts of XRP as on-chain reserve assets? Does this mean that the retail camp, once known as the "XRP Army", is gradually being replaced by institutional funds?

Related reading: Trident announces up to $500 million XRP treasury financing plan and appoints Chaince Securities LLC as strategic advisor

XRP is one of the earliest blockchain projects to enter the public eye, but it has long been labeled as "centralized", "lawsuit-ridden", and "lack of innovation". The tug-of-war with the SEC lasted for five years, the technological iteration slowed down, and the community participation was weak, making it a representative of "old-time projects". However, since 2024, the ecology of XRP has quietly shifted: the price has approached its historical high again, XRPL has built infrastructure around side chains, stablecoins, and DeFi modules, and corporate buying and development investment have gradually recovered. Although these changes are not noisy, they are accumulating substantial progress in multiple indicators.

This is not a narrative reversal of "returning to popularity", but a structural reconstruction completed in low attention. This article will start from the flow of funds, ecological evolution and on-chain data to observe how XRP can take the second path of "neither exploding nor dying" between controversy and silence.

Is XRP making a comeback?

Strategic Buying: Who is Buying XRP?

Although the mainstream narrative has not been updated, real-world funding options are providing another answer. Although XRP's image as an "old coin" in the crypto community has not yet been eliminated, the flow of funds in reality has quietly shifted.

Over the past year, this project, long regarded as a "centralized legacy", has not fallen into extinction. On the contrary, its price has been stable at around $2, and it has remained resilient in multiple rounds of market corrections. At the end of 2024, XRP's market value once exceeded USDT, returning to the top three crypto assets in the world; the on-chain TVL also increased from less than 10 million US dollars to more than 40 million US dollars during the same period.

Related reading: " XRP's market value returns to the third place in cryptocurrencies. What is driving its surge? "

At the same time, a number of institutions began to re-evaluate the asset attributes of XRP and include it in the medium- and long-term allocation range. On May 30, Hong Kong technology company Webus International launched a $300 million financing plan to use XRP for the global payment system. The next day, Nasdaq-listed energy company VivoPower announced the completion of $121 million in private equity financing to build an asset reserve mechanism with XRP as the core, led by members of the Saudi royal family and Ripple Ecosystem executives as consultants. On June 12, Trident DAO launched an XRP treasury plan with a ceiling of $500 million, incorporating it into on-chain governance and asset-linked tools.

These actual cases from the fields of energy, transportation and Web3 finance show that companies no longer perceive XRP as a controversial label or market narrative, but gradually see it as a realistic option for "weakly volatile digital assets". Especially with the SEC regulatory case coming to an end and Ripple improving its compliance path, XRP's legal uncertainty has eased, and its low handling fees and high settlement efficiency are more in line with cross-border payment and financial configuration needs.

Although the technical updates are still in progress, these fund behaviors have already formed a non-emotional, medium-term planning-oriented asset selection logic. In other words, even if the community still has doubts, the other side of the market is already redefining its value with actions.

Ecological reconstruction: no longer just a payment chain?

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

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

At the end of 2024, Ripple will launch an EVM sidechain compatible with Ethereum, and gradually expand the infrastructure capabilities of XRPL with the launch of the RLUSD stablecoin and the update of the main network functions. These measures have made XRP no longer limited to payment purposes, but 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 staking and revenue mechanisms in the XRPL native chain. Among them, Doppler Finance is one of the most representative projects at present. It adopts a dual-path architecture of custody and on-chain parallelism to provide income products and asset management interfaces to coin holders. According to official data, the platform's current TVL exceeds 30 million US dollars, and funds are operated through compliant custody channels, supporting users to view asset flows and sources of income.

Doppler Finance's dual-path revenue structure, source: official website

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

The first is a structured arbitrage strategy (such as spot-perpetual arbitrage, cross-platform price neutral arbitrage), which focuses on "net increase in XRP quantity" rather than pure US dollar income;

Doppler Finance’s CeDeFi Revenue Structure

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

XRPfi’s profit path structure in the on-chain ecosystem

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

According to DefiLlama data, as of June 2025, the TVL on the XRPL chain exceeded US$40 million for the first time, with funds mainly coming from South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and some European markets.

From the perspective of the path, XRP is currently trying a "turnaround narrative" similar to TRON or Solana - that is, transforming from a payment tool to an institutional financial protocol base. However, compared with the latter two, XRPL has not given up its "low cost, high certainty" compliance orientation, but has achieved expansion with the help of composable 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 gradual expansion of the ecosystem, XRP's perception in the mainstream community remains stuck in the old impression. For many crypto-native users, XRP is still a project that "lacks consensus."

This emotional gap is particularly evident on social platforms. Faced with continuous good news, some users left a message helplessly, "No more good news, the price of the currency has fallen again." This joking comment, to a certain extent, captures the real situation of the XRP community at present: construction continues, but emotions do not rise; the structure evolves, but the market does not feel it.

In short, XRP may not become the center of the narrative again, and it may not be 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 generally does not exceed five years, "still alive" itself may be scarce enough and worth taking another look.