The long-standing narrative surrounding XRP is undergoing a reversal.
In a recent post on Elon Musk’s X social media, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse agreed that the broader cryptocurrency industry is now desperately trying to copy the exact institutional strategy it once ridiculed.
The validation came to a head after Flare co-founder Hugo Philion spoke candidly during an episode of the AllInCrypto Podcast about the market’s changing attitudes toward Ripple and XRP.
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“They mocked the vision”
For years, critics and decentralized purists within the crypto space weaponized the term “banker coin” against XRP, bashing Ripple’s focused efforts to build a compliant, enterprise-grade payment infrastructure for legacy financial institutions.
However, as global regulations tighten and institutional adoption becomes the primary driver of market growth in 2026, those early criticisms have aged poorly.
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During his podcast appearance, Philion pointed out the sheer hypocrisy of competing blockchain networks that are now pivoting toward institutional utility. Reflecting on the early days of the digital asset landscape, Philion noted:
“What’s hilarious is that most of [the market], when XRP and Ripple kind of started out, they were accused of being the banker coin. And yet now, everyone in the entire industry is desperate to be the banker coin. It’s pathetic, really.”
Philion added that despite intense pushback from venture capitalists during Flare’s early funding rounds, he remained focused on the ecosystem because Ripple’s underlying solution for global payments “has broadly been in the right direction.”
Expanding the XRP Ledger with Flare 2.0
The validation of Ripple’s enterprise model extends beyond payments. The XRP Ledger (XRPL) has steadily grown into one of the largest chains in the digital asset space for Real World Asset (RWA) issuances.
To support this massive influx of institutional capital, Flare is introducing “Flare 2.0,” featuring a data and privacy layer called Flare Confidential Compute.
This system utilizes Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) (secure hardware enclaves similar to the chips that power smartphone facial recognition) to enable completely private, highly scalable, and fully compliant decentralized exchanges (DEXs) specifically tailored for RWAs on the XRP Ledger.