Yesterday, the decentralized asset management platform Trident announced the launch of an XRP treasury funding program of up to $500 million and appointed Chaince Securities LLC as its strategic advisor.

Against the backdrop of waning retail enthusiasm and cooling community discussions, this news has caught the market's attention: why are institutions still choosing to allocate large amounts to XRP as an on-chain reserve asset? Does this signal that the retail faction, once dubbed the "XRP Army," is gradually being replaced by institutional capital?

Related Reading: 《Trident Announces $500 Million XRP Treasury Funding Program and Appoints Chaince Securities LLC as Strategic Advisor》

XRP was one of the earliest blockchain projects to enter the public eye but has long been burdened with labels like "centralized," "lawsuit-ridden," and "lacking innovation." Its five-year legal battle with the SEC, slow pace of technical iteration, and weak community engagement once made it synonymous with "legacy projects" of the old era. However, since 2024, the XRP ecosystem has been quietly shifting gears: its price is nearing historical highs, XRPL has been building infrastructure around sidechains, stablecoins, and DeFi modules, and enterprise buying and development investments have been steadily picking up. While these changes have not been flashy, significant progress is being accumulated across multiple metrics.

This is not a "comeback" narrative turnaround but an underlying structural rebuild completed under low visibility. This article will delve into capital movements, ecosystem evolution, and on-chain data to examine how XRP is navigating a "second path" between being neither wildly explosive nor fading into obscurity.

Is XRP "Making a Comeback"?

Strategic Buying: Who Is Buying XRP?

While the mainstream narrative has yet to shift, real-world capital allocation is starting to tell a different story. Despite XRP's lingering "legacy token" image within the crypto community, capital flows in reality have already subtly pivoted.

Over the past year, this project, long considered a "centralized relic," has not fallen into obscurity. Instead, its price has remained stable around the $2 mark, demonstrating resilience during multiple market corrections. By the end of 2024, XRP’s market cap briefly surpassed that of USDT, reclaiming its spot among the top three largest cryptocurrencies globally; on-chain TVL (Total Value Locked) grew from under $10 million to over $40 million during the same period.

Related Reading: "XRP Market Cap Returns to Crypto's Top Three: What's Driving the Surge?"

Meanwhile, a cohort of institutions has begun reassessing XRP as an asset and incorporating it into their medium- to long-term strategies. On May 30, Hong Kong-based tech company Webus International launched a $300 million fundraising initiative, employing XRP for its global payment system. The next day, Nasdaq-listed energy firm VivoPower announced the completion of a $121 million private offering aimed at building an XRP-centric asset reserve mechanism, led by Saudi royal family members and Ripple ecosystem executives as advisors. On June 12, Trident DAO initiated a $500 million XRP treasury project, integrating it into on-chain governance and asset-pegging tools.

These real-world use cases from sectors such as energy, transportation, and Web3 finance collectively indicate that the perception of XRP has evolved beyond controversial labels or market narratives. Instead, it is increasingly being positioned as a viable "low-volatility digital asset" option. Particularly as the SEC regulatory case approaches resolution and Ripple refines its compliance pathways, XRP's legal uncertainties are diminishing. Combined with its low transaction fees and high settlement efficiency, XRP is becoming better aligned with the needs of cross-border payments and treasury management.

Although technical advancements are still underway, these capital movements represent a non-sentimental, medium-term strategic asset allocation logic. In other words, even if doubts persist within the community, another segment of the market is actively redefining XRP's value through actions.

Ecosystem Reshaping: No Longer Just a Payments Chain?

After being long characterized as a "cross-border payment channel," XRP's ecosystem is undergoing a systemic pivot. Over the past year, Ripple has successively launched an EVM-compatible sidechain, the USD-pegged stablecoin RLUSD, and developer initiatives alongside payment infrastructure collaborations in multiple countries.

From its initial role as a remittance network, Ripple is evolving into a multi-layer platform encompassing payments, custody, stablecoins, and project incubation, aiming to deliver a comprehensive on-chain financial services stack for institutional clients. As the product structure continues expanding, a new generation of protocols built around the XRPL is emerging, bringing this once-traditional blockchain into broader applications like on-chain finance, yield management, and asset governance.

By the end of 2024, Ripple plans to launch an Ethereum-compatible EVM sidechain alongside the rollout of the RLUSD stablecoin and mainnet functionality upgrades, gradually enhancing the XRPL infrastructure. These developments enable XRP to expand beyond its traditional role as a payment token, unlocking its potential to support on-chain financial applications.

Building on these underlying updates, a new type of on-chain financial structure known as "XRPFi" has begun to take shape. Its core goal is to inject new utility into XRP on-chain, addressing the absence of native staking and yield mechanisms within the XRPL network. Among the emerging projects, Doppler Finance stands out as a representative example. It adopts a dual-path architecture combining custodial and on-chain strategies, offering yield products and asset management interfaces to token holders. According to official data, the platform currently boasts a TVL of over $30 million, with funds managed via compliant custodial channels, enabling users to view asset flows and yield sources.

The dual-path yield structure of Doppler Finance, Source: Official Website

From a product structuring perspective, Doppler’s yield strategies are mainly derived from two models:

The first is structured arbitrage strategies (e.g., spot-perpetual arbitrage, cross-platform price-neutral arbitrage), which focus on "net gains in XRP quantity" rather than purely USD-based returns.

The CeDeFi yield structure of Doppler Finance

The second involves utilizing XRP as collateral to acquire stablecoins, which are then deployed into high-liquidity DeFi protocols to achieve risk-controlled earnings with low leverage. Additionally, the platform supports staking rewards on the Root Network, the forthcoming XRPL lending protocol, and one-click staking leverage tools designed to lower barriers to user participation.

The yield path structure of XRPFi within the on-chain ecosystem

In addition to Doppler, projects such as OnXRP, Magnetic, and Anodos, which focus on AMMs and lending, have emerged on XRPL. Some of these protocols are deployed on XRPL's EVM sidechain, while others leverage asset mapping through sidechains like Root Network. The entire XRPFi ecosystem has not followed a "high TVL sprint" approach but has instead gradually built a DeFi system tailored to the structure of XRP users through sidechain expansion, compliance interfaces, and incentive mechanisms.

According to DefiLlama data, as of June 2025, the TVL on XRPL has surpassed 40 million USD for the first time, with funds primarily originating from markets in South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, and parts of Europe.

In terms of its trajectory, XRP is currently exploring a "pivoting narrative" similar to those of Tron or Solana—transitioning from a payment tool to a base layer for institutional financial protocols. However, compared to the latter two, XRPL has not abandoned its "low fee, high certainty" compliance-focused orientation. Instead, while maintaining a streamlined mainnet structure, it achieves scalability through composable sidechains.

This "technical layering + application specialization" model, although progressing slowly, is establishing new application boundaries for XRP and forming the foundation for the development of the XRPFi ecosystem.

Not the Star, But Still Alive

Despite the gradual expansion of its ecosystem, XRP's perception within the mainstream community remains rooted in outdated impressions. For many crypto-native users, XRP is still seen as a project "lacking consensus."

This disconnect in sentiment is particularly evident on social media platforms. In the face of continuous positive developments, some users have resignedly commented, "No more good news, the price dropped again." This tongue-in-cheek remark captures the current reality of the XRP community to some extent: continuous building, stagnant sentiment; structural evolution, market indifference.

In summary, XRP may never again be the center of the narrative, nor is it likely to be a suitable choice for short-term investors seeking explosive growth. However, it continues to build, remains integrated into institutional financial systems, and still attracts developers to construct financial infrastructure. In an industry where project life cycles rarely exceed five years, simply "staying alive" might already be rare enough and worthy of a second look.

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