Payments are the reason I’ve focused on XRP over other projects, because nearly every future use case runs through payments in some form. Micropayments, wholesale payments, transactions inside a metaverse, payments between AI agents, whatever scenario you picture, it needs a payment rail underneath it.
The Amazon comparison
Think about how Amazon started with books and expanded from there once the underlying logistics worked. Ripple’s starting point is payments, but the applications built on top of that foundation are still mostly unwritten. We don’t yet have a clear read on how many AI agents will eventually be transacting digitally, or how that scales further once robotics and automated labor start needing to pay for things too. Add universal basic income proposals that increasingly get discussed in the context of digital assets, and you’re looking at a use case nobody can fully size yet.
Why “buy and hold” is the actual strategy
That uncertainty is exactly why the simplest approach makes sense: buy, hold, and look for productive ways to put the asset to work rather than trying to predict every application in advance. Nobody, including people close to the ecosystem, can intuit how big this gets, because the infrastructure being built today enables applications that don’t exist yet.
The postal mail analogy
A useful comparison here is postal mail versus email. Someone sending mail regularly might have sent 20 to 25 letters a week. Today, a similar volume of messages can show up in the first ten minutes of checking email. That’s not a small improvement, it’s an entirely different order of magnitude, and it happened because removing friction didn’t just replace the old volume, it multiplied it. Payments could follow the same pattern: once settlement friction drops enough, transaction volume doesn’t just shift from one rail to another, it explodes into use cases that weren’t economical before. Some people expect that scale to eventually dwarf global GDP as it’s measured today. That’s a big claim, and it’s speculative, not something anyone can promise. But the underlying mechanism, removing friction multiplies volume rather than just redistributing it, has already played out with communication infrastructure, and there’s a real argument it plays out the same way with money.
Educational only, not tax, legal, or investment advice. Check primary sources and speak with a qualified professional before making financial decisions.
