Updates

Clarity Act Timeline and Price Predictions

Broadcasting live from ETH Denver with his full advisory team, Jake addressed the elephant in the room: he still has no specific price predictions or exact time frames. However, Patrick Wit, the White House point person on cryptocurrency, stated he’s hopeful the Clarity Act will pass by the Friday before Easter, which gives the market roughly 48 days from the stream date.

Jake maintains a contrarian view compared to some of his close business associates. Even his business partner Max doesn’t expect XRP price appreciation before the Clarity Act passes. Jake disagrees. He thinks the bill will need to be split because Democrats oppose several provisions around DeFi regulations, specifically around permissionless ecosystems. Democrats want oversight and accountability, and Jake admits he agrees with many of their concerns given his position managing nearly 400 million XRP at Digital Wealth Partners.

Why DeFi Needs Regulatory Oversight

Jake laid out his vision for how lending protocols on the XRPL will likely function, and it’s not the pure permissionless DeFi model many expect. He sees four parties involved in most transactions: a borrower, a lender, a broker, and an arbiter.

For overcollateralized loans (the current DeFi standard), you have two parties contributing to a pool. One provides XRP or an issued asset, the other receives a loan against it. But for traditional loans, the kind banks and institutions will want, you need a broker who underwrites risk, understands loan constraints, and acts as a neutral third party. If disputes arise or loans aren’t repaid, an arbiter steps in with visibility into the on-chain activity to make determinations.

Jake believes regulators will need visibility into these ecosystems, likely through an RIA, broker-dealer, or similar entity administering the system. This prevents bad actors and provides the grace periods and insurance that traditional finance users expect. When the market tanked recently, Digital Wealth Partners’ clients with triparty agreements had time to meet capital calls. Pure DeFi participants got liquidated instantly with no grace period.

The takeaway: people want the efficiency of DeFi but the assurances of traditional finance. Legislation will get there, but the DeFi portions of the Clarity Act will likely be stripped out and addressed separately.

The Iran Situation and Macro Catalysts

Jake has been tracking a large U.S. naval ship moving into the Gulf of Oman. Iran has been running drills in the Strait of Hormuz, and Jake believes Iran will view the naval presence as an escalation. He’s careful to say he doesn’t want collateral damage or a World War III scenario, but if Iran were to shut down the Strait of Hormuz even temporarily to negotiate, it would cause oil and yen to spike.

That spike would trigger the reverse carry trade unwind Jake has been discussing for nearly two years. He compared himself to Michael Burry, who called the 2008 housing crisis two years early while his investors thought he was crazy and tried to pull their money. Jake sees similar dynamics now: sentiment at multi-year lows while fundamentals are at all-time highs. Institutions are leaning in, real-world applications are going live, and clarity is imminent, yet prices remain depressed.

He drew parallels to Amazon trading at $4 to $6 in 2001 after collapsing from $96. Jeff Bezos watched the share price crater while the business fundamentals improved. That’s how Jake views crypto right now.

Permissioned DEXs Going Live This Week

Jake expects permissioned DEXs to go live on the XRPL this Wednesday. This amendment allows digital identity credentials and permissioned domains, which banks need to operate in siloed ecosystems within an open decentralized network. Banks want to pass payments between each other, audit transactions, and participate with proper credentials.

This is the final puzzle piece for institutional adoption at scale, the phrase Ripple’s Monica Long used at Community Day when asked about 2026. Until now, Ripple’s ODL product has functioned more like a loan arrangement. Ripple loans XRP to a bank, Uphold swaps it for fiat, the bank uses it for seven days and pays it back with interest, then Uphold swaps it back to XRP and returns it to Ripple.

In that model, if XRP price drops during the loan period, Ripple gets more XRP back when the bank repurchases it. Jake isn’t suggesting Ripple manipulates price, just that certain dynamics have worked in their favor. He believes Ripple has been a good steward of the asset and that their long-term interests align with XRP holders.

Institutional Adoption Requires High, Stable Prices

Monica Long said institutional adoption at scale is coming in 2026. David Schwartz followed up later that evening discussing why institutions don’t want to hold volatile assets on their balance sheets. XRP needs to reach a high, stable price before institutions truly adopt it.

Jake believes supply and demand dynamics will push the price higher, then payment flows moving over the network will maintain price stability at that elevated level. For the XRPL to handle payments at scale, it needs more than just the current 1,500 transactions per second capacity. Mastercard and Visa both process around 30,000 TPS today.

The XRPL has solutions: payment channels, trust lines, implicit or explicit subnets (Bob has a patent on this), and sidechains. Jake learned this from conversations with Matt Hamilton, David Schwartz, and developers from Bank of America and other large institutions. He’s quick to note he’s not a coder and didn’t build the XRPL, he just listens to people smarter than him.

Other amendments Jake is watching include batch payments, which needs one more vote to pass, and the borrow/lend protocol. Batch payments are critical for moving payments at scale unless Ripple uses subnet technology.

Why Banks Won’t Just Use RLUSD

Someone asked why banks would touch XRP if they can settle trillions instantly through Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin. Jake’s response: counterparty risk. Ripple is the counterparty when you use RLUSD. Why would Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Citibank funnel trillions into Ripple’s treasury when they can issue their own stablecoins and earn yield off the backing treasuries themselves?

These banks will issue their own stablecoins for internal infrastructure. But they need something for interoperability between RLUSD, a Bank of America stablecoin, JPMcoin, Citycoin, and others. None of these institutions want to hold another institution’s stablecoin or redeem those assets. They don’t want to benefit a competitor when they could benefit themselves.

You need a neutral bridge they all trust. A DEX that allows all these stablecoins to swap. Otherwise, you just recreate the Nostro/Vostro account problem on-chain. RLUSD will do well for Ripple, but large banks won’t fund Ripple’s business when they can fund their own. Jake is confident in this thesis after attending multiple conferences with BlackRock, State Street, and other major players.

Digital Wealth Partners Updates

Jake announced a limited-time discount for onboarding with Digital Wealth Partners. Through the end of February (12 days remaining at the time of the stream), people who already have an LLC can onboard for $900 instead of the usual $1,000 using the code ONBOARD100. You don’t have to fund your account immediately, which is helpful for people waiting for the yield product to cover AUM fees.

Speaking of the yield product, Jake has been working on it for close to eight months. He has a verbal agreement but not a signed deal yet. Once the signature is on the dotted line, the infrastructure is ready to launch almost immediately. He expects it will be popular and cause a rush of new clients, so he’s encouraging people to onboard proactively if they’re planning to eventually anyway.

On the income fund and growth fund (the two products he can legally discuss), the income fund pays quarterly cash dividends, which are taxable. The growth fund compounds your XRP position. If you put in 100 XRP and it grows to 200 XRP over several years, you can redeem the first 100 XRP with no tax implications and leave the other 100 to continue compounding. As long as you don’t redeem the gains, it’s not a taxable event.

Jake wants to tokenize the funds within the next few years so clients can take issued assets over to the borrow protocol and get loans against their fund positions. That would provide liquidity without tax implications while the position continues to compound.

For staking on the XRPL, if it ever launches, the way Digital Wealth Partners is structured with Anchorage holding assets in multi-sig wallets means clients wouldn’t have dominion and control. Under current tax law, that means staking rewards wouldn’t be taxable until withdrawn. Jake has tax letters from CPAs supporting this structure.

Anchorage Security Deep Dive

A Carbon 2 member asked about Anchorage security. Jake explained they use a derivative of Copper that utilizes HSM (hardware security modules) rather than MPC (multi-party computation) technology. HSMs are physical infrastructure required for FIPS compliance in the U.S. Any large institution using electronic transfers must have HSMs.

Anchorage creates wallet addresses through an algorithm. Nobody ever sees the keys. They’re encrypted, sharded, and those shards are held across HSMs globally. When you want to execute a transaction, you whitelist a wallet address (like your cold storage wallet). Withdrawals can take up to 24 hours, though they often happen faster. The friction is intentional for security.

The keys never fully come back together when reassembled for a transaction. It’s as quantum-resistant as any technology Jake has seen. BlackRock holds their assets at Anchorage, which gave Jake confidence. If BlackRock can hold assets anywhere and chooses Anchorage, that’s a strong signal.

Accounts are insured up to $100 million by Lloyd’s of London using Marsh as the broker. Jake’s team has reviewed the policies extensively since starting the onboarding process in June 2024. Anchorage is an OCC-regulated federally chartered bank, formerly a New York chartered bank. There’s friction in the system, but it’s a federally chartered bank for a reason.

Midterms and Legislative Risk

Jake doesn’t think Democrats are anti-crypto, he thinks they need education. This technology is hard to understand if you’re not working with it daily. Many legislators still think in terms of 2017-2018 when you had to roll back blockchains and fork them. They don’t understand smart contracts, issued assets, and how modern compliance works.

He also suspects some Democrats oppose crypto simply because Trump advocated for it during the election. Jake wishes the U.S. had more than two parties. If Democrats take control of the House or Senate in the midterms, he doesn’t think legislation will pass. That doesn’t hurt XRP since it already has clarity in the U.S., but it would hold back the rest of the industry.

Jake thinks there are many good projects beyond XRP. He cited Hyperliquid for perpetuals on-chain and Hidden Road, which Ripple Prime partnered with. First movers with traction doing things the right way deserve support. If the Clarity Act doesn’t pass, those projects suffer. He believes the XRPL will be the backbone of everything, but you still need multiple chains and applications doing specific tasks better suited to them than the XRPL.

Community Events and Resources

Jake mentioned the XRP community event Ray Fuentes is hosting Thursday evening in Denver. Digital Ascension Group is sponsoring it, and Jake will be speaking Friday at ETH Denver. He encouraged anyone within a couple hours of Denver to attend.

He also highlighted the Beyond Broke mastermind community, which now has 16,000 members globally. Members are organizing their own local meetups, including one on St. Patrick’s Day in Nashville. The code BEYONDBROKE1MO gets the first month for $2. Jake emphasized he wants people to find good communities before price appreciation happens, not just for financial discussions but to break bread and build real relationships.

The mastermind hosts digital asset discussions every Monday at 11 a.m. Central in a 30-minute recorded session. Jake covers topics there that don’t make it into his public livestreams.

Jake closed by thanking his 191,000 YouTube subscribers. He never thought that many people would care what he has to say and remains humbled by the support. He encouraged viewers to like, subscribe, and share to help the algorithm push content to more people.

Ripple Doubles Down on XRP Strategy

During XRP Community Day, Ripple’s leadership made several significant statements about the company’s direction. Brad Garlinghouse reiterated that XRP is at the core of what Ripple does and that they are advocates for the token network. Everything they’re building is designed to garner adoption for the blockchain in an institutional manner for enterprises, markets, and real world assets.

Monica Long went further, stating her belief that 2026 will bring institutional adoption at scale for the XRPL and XRP. She said we should revisit that prediction on December 31st of this year. If they’re on track to achieve institutional adoption at scale, that means substantial volume and significantly higher prices are necessary to facilitate that level of activity.

RLUSD as the Gateway Drug

Jack McDonald and Lauren discussed how Ripple is utilizing RLUSD across multiple use cases: payment flows, treasury management, prime brokerage, and as pristine collateral with Ripple Prime. Right now, RLUSD is seeing the most traction among institutions, which makes sense as the stable coin division’s primary focus.

The stable coin acts as a gateway for broader adoption of the asset class. Ripple is already working to pilot multiple other stable coins in different currencies and jurisdictions. The recent Xan Bank announcement for an AED stable coin backed by UAE bonds and treasuries demonstrates this multi-currency approach.

There’s a synergistic relationship between RLUSD and XRP. It’s an infinite feedback loop where they work together to settle value and payments. Ripple issues RLUSD on ecosystems that are adopting XRP as collateral or using it in some capacity in DeFi. They just launched on several L2s on Ethereum, including Arbitrum and other networks.

Why Banks Want This Technology

David Schwartz explained how excited banks and institutions are to reduce costs using this technology. Banks don’t care about the philosophical aspects of blockchain. They care about making more money. Any way they can cut costs, increase efficiency, and clip more basis points is appealing to them.

Consider how much time money sits idle. We have President’s Day this week. Money can’t move. Over weekends, money sits idle. There are 10 bank holidays per year. Add 52 weeks times 2 days per weekend, and you get 104 days plus 10 holidays, which equals 114 days where money isn’t working. Factor in evening downtime, and you’re looking at roughly two-fifths of the year where capital generates no revenue.

If banks could operate 24/7/365 without money sitting idle, they would jump at that opportunity. Using the XRPL and XRP allows them to do exactly that. They can make payments, clip additional yield, and keep capital working constantly. That’s the value proposition institutions see.

The Volatility Problem and Its Solution

David Schwartz identified the two main obstacles to XRP adoption: regulatory uncertainty and volatility. Even when some institutions are okay with volatility at small scales, banks simply won’t hold a volatile asset at scale. They’re working on solutions to hedge that volatility or only have institutions hold XRP for short periods when making payments, like with ODL.

The solution to volatility is liquidity. XRP will operate very similar to an index on the stock market. It takes billions of dollars in inflows or outflows to move an index by a quarter basis point. They’re very stable once there’s enough liquidity in an asset or market. The more liquidity in XRP, the higher the price, and the more stable that value becomes. That stability leads to more institutional adoption.

With regulatory clarity from the Genius Act and likely the Clarity Act in 2026, the adoption rate changes dramatically. These are the two components needed: regulatory clarity and sufficient liquidity at a high price point.

Historic Low Sentiment Meets All-Time High Fundamentals

The Bitcoin fear and greed index sits at five. Five. This is the lowest sentiment level ever recorded. Google Analytics for people searching crypto right now shows lower interest than after the Terra Luna crash, FTX collapse, Voyager, and Celsius in 2021 and 2022. It’s obliterated.

If you’re still here, you’re buying or holding at a time where sentiment is completely opposite of fundamentals. Institutions are leaning in. At the Onondo Summit in New York last week, every large institution was there: Franklin Templeton, Citi, Goldman, BNY. They were all discussing how they’re going to leverage this technology inside their own infrastructure and how it will change markets in 2026.

Yet people are scared. People are fearful. Prices are way down. Warren Buffett’s famous quote applies perfectly here: “Be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy.” There has never been more fear. We are literally at the lowest point ever in the market for fear right now.

Backend Settlement Must Come First

Paul Atkins discussed the tokenization of the back end of the stock market on a news network earlier this week. He said we’re right on the cusp of that taking place. Backend settlement will happen before they tokenize stocks. You need instant settlement, T+0 versus the current T+1, between clearing houses and brokers before implementing tokenization of the stock market.

They said they would tokenize the stock market in the latter half of this year, after Q2. Hopefully the Clarity Act passes by then. Robinhood is creating their own blockchain to tokenize stocks on their exchange. NASDAQ, NYSE, and the new Texas Stock Exchange are all leaning in. The Texas Stock Exchange launched this year and will do ETFs first, then move to tokenized stocks in Q4.

First order of business is backend settlement and real-time clearing for the DTCC. That might coincide with significant price appreciation on certain assets that people hold.

Permission DEX Goes Live February 18th

In just seven days, permission DEX launches on the XRPL. This is the last piece of the puzzle for Ripple to really get institutional adoption for the payment component leveraging XRP to settle transactions. The XRPL already has digital identity credentials and permission domains. Permission DEX completes the functionality required for institutional adoption.

Corda can already leverage XRP to settle between siloed ecosystems using the Corda Settler. That’s what Project Ion was about, the partnership between the DTCC and R3 finalized in 2022 before XRP had clarity here in the US. If there’s enough liquidity in XRP, we could potentially see them start leveraging it to achieve everything we want to happen.

Why XRP Will Appreciate Before the Clarity Act

XRP has a moat right now. It’s the only asset uniquely positioned to facilitate the volume of payments required for certain markets prior to the Clarity Act passing. It’s the only blockchain with the functionality that allows for institutional adoption with digital identity credentials, permission domains, and soon permission DEX.

If Ripple continues pushing forward, XRP might appreciate right before the Clarity Act passes, and then that legislation would pour gas on the fire. The same applies to permission DEX. XRP already has clarity in the US. It’s listed on exchanges as a commodity. There’s significant traction from Ripple’s acquisitions for enterprise-scale adoption.

The Clarity Act faces challenges. The markup passed, but no Democrats voted for it. If we reach midterms and Democrats take control of the House or Senate, we might not see the Clarity Act this year. They may strip out the DeFi component, which is the main source of Democratic opposition, and pass a separate bill for DeFi later.

Lending on the XRPL

David Schwartz discussed how traditional lending components happen off-chain. Only the facilitation of the credit transfer, the debit and credit, happens on the XRPL. Institutions will always underwrite risk on loans. They look at credit scores, income, and all the traditional metrics before issuing credit, whether it’s a mortgage, car loan, or line of credit.

You can already put up collateral on-chain and borrow against it. The next evolution involves token value issued against portfolios of loans. You’ll be able to participate and put your liquidity to work in one of those portfolios on-chain. Because it’s native to the network, there’s no single counterparty controlling it.

Four components will be involved: the lender, the borrower, a broker who does underwriting and oversight, and an arbiter for disputes. Much of this happens off-chain, with only the credit facilitation occurring on-chain. There’s no counterparty risk or centralized authority managing the ecosystem. The people contributing to the pool earn returns based on the lending rate.

Stable Coins Drive Treasury Demand

People often ask why they should care about stable coins when they don’t go up or down to make money. The answer is that stable coins add liquidity to the ecosystem through stability. Banks and enterprises won’t hold volatile cryptocurrencies, but they will hold stable coins.

There’s another piece most people miss: stable coins drive domestic demand for US treasuries. The rest of the world is selling off US debt. Russia and China have already sold the majority of their US treasury holdings. The European Union, the largest holder at about two trillion, and Japan are starting to delever.

For the world to progress to a multipolar system, there needs to be domestic demand for treasuries. The Genius Act creates real institutional demand domestically for treasuries and US debt. That’s good for the economy because treasuries are the bedrock and backbone of the financial system as it exists today. Stable coins provide a transition mechanism while the system evolves.

Tokenized Deposits vs Stable Coins

Banks are definitely going to tokenize deposits, and they’ll be able to pay yield on those. They won’t be able to pass yield to holders of stable coins under current regulations, though Coinbase is trying to change that in the Clarity Act.

Stable coins will primarily be used by institutions for their own internal settlement. Citi will have their stable coin. Goldman will have theirs. Bank of America and JP Morgan have their own. These banks don’t want to hold a counterparty’s stable coin because they’d rather issue their own and hold the treasuries to generate yield themselves. There’s inherent value in holding your own stable coins over somebody else’s.

Tokenized deposits are different. You’ll be able to swap between a money market and your tokenized deposit or earn yield on your tokenized deposit at the bank. If banks can earn two-fifths more money on your money than they do today, they’ll be much more willing to pay out yield to aggregate more capital.

The Path to Three-Digit XRP

XRP needs to reach around $100 before Swift and other major players can really utilize the asset and settle through it. At that price point, there will be enough liquidity for them to operate at scale. You can’t have institutional adoption with $7 or $20 XRP. It won’t be usable with less liquidity than that.

The more volatile the asset is, the less likely institutions and enterprises will adopt it. It needs to be a high, stable value to get the traction and adoption required. Ripple is advocating for this. Companies like Evernym and R3 are advocating for adoption of this asset with the institutions and enterprises they work with.

These institutions want to use XRP because it reduces costs, reduces friction, and allows them to make more money. That will only happen if we see three-digit plus XRP. The ETFs, high demand, exchanges going illiquid, and Tether depegging will all cause significant demand for XRP and drive the price up.

I’ve been saying for a while that the macro setup was getting tense, and now we’re watching it unfold right in front of us. Oil is on the move, geopolitics are heating up, and the financial plumbing that keeps the world running is starting to creak. If you’re paying attention, this is exactly the kind of environment that accelerates big shifts in global liquidity and pushes innovation, especially in digital settlement systems like XRP.

So, let’s start with oil. Prices have been climbing after reports that Israel carried out strikes on Iranian military sites. That sent Brent crude up more than four percent in a single day, according to Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/oil-prices-jump-more-than-4-after-israel-strikes-iran-2025-06-13. Anytime you get a move like that in energy, it changes everything from inflation expectations to how central banks think about interest rates.

The bigger issue is geography. About twenty percent of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman that has been a geopolitical flashpoint for decades.When that area gets unstable, oil traders get nervous, and inflation risk comes roaring back. If you’ve been around markets long enough, you know inflation equals tighter liquidity, and tighter liquidity squeezes everything from equities to crypto.

Now here’s where it connects to the financial system. For decades, global investors have been borrowing cheap money in Japan and reinvesting it elsewhere. That’s what’s called the yen carry trade. When Japan starts raising rates, that trade unwinds—and when that happens, you get forced selling across all kinds of assets. Wellington Management did a solid breakdown of this recently that’s worth reading: https://www.wellington.com/en-us/institutional/insights/the-yen-carry-trade-unwind. This kind of deleveraging doesn’t just hit stocks and bonds, it drains liquidity from every corner of the market.

And when liquidity dries up, governments panic. Historically, they’ve flooded the system with treasuries or central bank swap lines to keep things moving. But this time, there’s a new lever on the table—stablecoins. They’ve become a potential backstop for liquidity, and regulation around them is being fast-tracked. In fact, Japan’s biggest banks just announced plans to issue a yen-backed stablecoin to streamline interbank settlements.

That’s a huge deal. It means the traditional financial system is starting to use blockchain rails not for speculation, but for function. Real-world settlement. This is the direction things are moving globally.

And that’s where XRP fits perfectly. When markets lock up and liquidity gets scarce, you need a bridge asset that can move value instantly across jurisdictions. XRP was built for that. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and it can settle in real time with minimal counterparty risk. The more the traditional system gets strained, the clearer the need for that kind of infrastructure becomes.

Here’s my read. We’re in the early stages of a macro liquidity shift that could redefine how money moves around the world. Rising oil prices, geopolitical stress, and the unwind of decades-old leverage are setting the stage for new digital liquidity rails. Stablecoins will play a big role, but assets like XRP—already engineered for institutional-grade settlement—are the real backbone of what’s coming next.

The reset isn’t on the horizon anymore. It’s happening in real time. The smart money sees it, the banks are preparing for it, and the people who understand liquidity flow are going to be the ones who come out ahead.

AI Agents Are Coming Whether You’re Ready or Not

I just had dinner with a new engineer for our business who specializes in AI. We also recently invested in an AI company that’s still in stealth mode, but what they’re building is worth talking about.

Most people use AI as glorified search engines. They ask ChatGPT or Claude questions and get answers back. That’s fine, but it’s just scratching the surface. The real shift is happening with AI agents that execute tasks based on deterministic logic, not just probabilistic responses.

Here’s a simple example: imagine you’re at the grocery store. An AI agent can detect your location and automatically text your spouse asking if they need anything. You set the rule once, and it executes every time the conditions are met. That’s what AI agents do at their core—they handle repetitive tasks based on specific inputs.

The company we invested in connects different applications and data to create programmatic results. You could tell it to access five different apps and build an entire sales funnel with automated emails, payment links, and webinar registrations. It’s similar to what Zapier does with Zaps, but through an AI model with API integrations and webhooks.

If you’re not using AI to help with your business or job, you’re falling behind. The better you can communicate with an AI, the better results you’ll get. Right now we’re in the early days, but there’s going to be an entire economy of AI agents interacting with one another. There’s already a social media platform called MaltBook where AI agents converse with each other. Cryptocurrency plays a role here because these agents need a way to transfer value between themselves and with humans.

The Ripple XRP Sales Debate

I saw someone in the chat say “Ripple is a scam” because they sell XRP to retail. Let me be clear: I don’t make any bones about it. Ripple absolutely sells XRP onto the market to fund their business. They release escrow on the first of every month, and some of that XRP moves to market.

But here’s what people miss: Ripple uses that revenue to make acquisitions that increase institutional adoption and enterprise value. They’ve acquired Hidden Road, G Treasury, Rail, Palisade, Medeco, and others. With those acquisitions, they now have a full stack of solutions they’re calling Ripple One.

This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. These acquisitions allow Ripple to divert their income away from selling XRP to the actual services they provide. Brad Garlinghouse reiterated today on David Schwartz’s post that XRP remains core and central to Ripple’s ethos.

Ripple is now a top 10 private company globally at a $50 billion valuation, alongside Stripe, SpaceX, and others. That’s a massive achievement. In the private markets, if you wanted exposure to a digital asset treasury company, Ripple would absolutely fit that criteria. Brad has alluded to believing Ripple’s worth much higher than current secondary market valuations of $120-150 per share.

Why XRP Hasn’t Hit $25 Yet

Someone asked why XRP hasn’t reached $25 from ETF volume alone, since I mentioned that as possible. The answer is simple: the OTC desks and dark pools haven’t been depleted yet. ETF volume hasn’t forced purchases through exchanges at scale to drive demand and price.

Once we see depletion of OTC desks and dark pools, $25 is reasonable from that market action alone. But I think it’ll go substantially higher because it needs to happen all at once. If institutional demand doesn’t come in a concentrated wave, XRP won’t reach the prices required for it to facilitate global trade settlement, back-end stock market settlement, FX flows, and potentially SWIFT replacement.

There needs to be enough liquidity in the asset for that adoption to take place. You need an unreasonable amount of demand hitting a constricted supply. We’ve seen this on individual exchanges before. XRP hit around $100 on both Upbit and Kraken for very short periods when there wasn’t enough supply to meet demand. Imagine that scenario across all exchanges simultaneously.

The Macro Setup: Reverse Carry Trade and Tether

I still think we could see this in 2026, but it’s predicated on macro events playing out. Conflict in the Middle East continues to escalate. Russia is removing people from the region in anticipation of further conflict. Lloyd’s of London has increased insurance costs to move through the Strait of Hormuz.

When that strait gets shut down, oil prices will spike. That hits Japan particularly hard, which is the catalyst for the reverse carry trade unwinding. If Japan raises interest rates aggressively, you’ll see bond yields spike and rotation out of US treasuries into Japanese bonds issued by the BOJ.

This is where Tether comes in. Tether now holds approximately 27 tons of gold purchased in Q4 last year, making them one of the largest sovereign holders of gold. If gold falls back to $2,100-2,200 and silver to $50—which I think needs to happen to touch technical support—that’s enough of a move down to cause solvency issues for Tether.

Tether depegging creates solvency issues for exchanges. That drives demand from exchanges for XRP. This isn’t me making stuff up. Go back and look at the Shane Ellis theory from years ago. He theorized that Bitfinex could go insolvent if there was an issue with Tether, and that could drive XRP to $589 by itself on that exchange alone.

Bitcoin’s Systemic Risk and T+0 Settlement

Someone asked why BlackRock and MicroStrategy would let Bitcoin fall when they hold 1.5 million Bitcoin between them. Great question. The answer is that sometimes institutions and governments orchestrate crises to implement change.

Bitcoin now has systemic risk. Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and almost every financial product has some exposure to Bitcoin. The ETFs have been a huge driver for this. About 1.5% of Bitcoin’s supply is held just by MicroStrategy and BlackRock’s ETFs, not counting other ETFs.

If you wanted to force the narrative for T+0 settlement on the stock market, the way to do it would be to create a situation where institutions need to de-risk from Bitcoin immediately. Bitcoin settles in 30-45 minutes before three validations occur. That doesn’t work for real-time stock settlement.

If there are huge unrealized losses in Bitcoin from significant downside, investment banks have no way to de-risk for at least 24 hours because stocks settle T+1. But if you moved to real-time settlement on the back end of the stock market, you could de-risk from those positions instantly.

They already have that option in place because of Project ION from DTCC. When they moved to T+1 on May 28th, 2024, they included an option to move to T+0 with settlement through a digital asset. The only digital asset in the US with regulatory clarity from the courts is XRP. Until the Clarity Act passes, it has a moat.

XRPL Amendments Coming This Month

We’re waiting on permissioned DEXs, and once that’s in place, institutions will come in droves to settle payment flows through XRP. You already have digital identity, credentials, and permissioned domains on the XRPL. The last piece for institutional payment flows is a permissioned DEX because institutions don’t want everyone to have access to their transaction data.

Zero knowledge proof is a big piece of why institutions would leverage the XRPL with sidechains and the mainnet. Token escrow goes live in the next three days. Permissioned DEXs go live on February 18th. You’ve also got pseudo accounts or vault accounts alongside borrow/lend functionality coming.

All of this coming to the XRPL in the near future, along with DeFi capabilities, sets up explosive adoption in 2026. We’re in the early days of native DeFi on the XRPL. The Hooks sidechain is the test environment for implementing lightweight smart contracts on the mainnet, similar to what Soroban smart contracts do on Stellar (which is a direct derivative of XRPL).

The Clarity Act Timeline

The Clarity Act is being marked up this week. Ripple and other large banks are in DC tomorrow having continued conversations. The markup passed with no Democratic support recently. Unless they get some Democratic support in the Senate, it’s highly unlikely you’ll see the Clarity Act passed in the short term.

Patrick McHenry mentioned April 3rd as the latest date he thought it might pass during his talk at the Ondo Summit. With midterms coming up, if they can’t get traction with the current language, it may take much longer. If Democrats win enough votes in either the House or Senate during midterms, it’ll get much more difficult for the Clarity Act to pass as written.

There’s a possibility the DeFi component gets stripped out and voted on later through a separate bill. You might see just the clarity around CFTC and SEC oversight of digital assets pass first. I think we’ll probably end up with three different crypto bills total.

We already had the Genius Act pass, which provides demand for US treasuries backing stablecoins domestically. That’s going to be important when the reverse carry trade unwinds.

Why Most People Won’t Self-Custody

Someone asked if self-custody is our right. I think over the long term, most people aren’t going to want to self-custody. The majority of the population does not want that responsibility.

Prior to the 1960s, people took stock certificates and put them in their safe at home. That’s what you’re doing with crypto when you move it to a cold wallet. There’s liability and responsibility that comes with that. You don’t get the assurances of institutional custody with insurance and other protections.

A lot of assets just don’t have the infrastructure built yet. We’ve been hounding Anchorage for a year trying to get HBAR and XDC custody on the wealth management side. They’ve done it B2B but not for wealth management clients yet.

When we worked with the SEC to draft rules for RIAs, we advocated that people could still hold assets on their own cold wallet. I don’t think self-custody is going away anytime soon, but I do think there will be adoption of institutional custody at scale as quantum computers and other threats emerge.

HBAR and the Compliance Advantage

Someone asked for an update on HBAR since my video two years ago. HBAR hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just continued to iterate and grow. I think it’s going to be successful in the future. HBAR or Hash are probably my number two for ROI over the long term.

I think the majority of Web3 dApps will be built on HBAR. It’ll likely be the backbone for permissioned black box AI solutions because of the security measures on that network and the large council members participating.

When people say their system is better than XRP’s blockchain, I’d point out what’s unique about the XRPL: the compliance components built in and announced over the last year, the interoperability, and the DEX. For exchange of fiat currencies and other assets moving through XRP, the XRPL is positioned to have the most adoption for back-end settlement for instant enterprises over the long term, with or without the Clarity Act.

As of today, the only three digital assets with regulatory clarity in the US are Bitcoin, ETH, and XRP. There are no others. That’s really where XRP has the advantage—it’s the only scalable option for real-time payments at the institutional level.