Long-standing XRP supporters are growing increasingly frustrated with Ripple’s string of institutional wins, arguing that the company’s expansion into stablecoins and custody has not translated into the token price gains many expected. The tension came into sharp focus on November 2, when XRP community member Fabrizio Scudu posted an emotional message directed at Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and CTO emeritus David Schwartz, saying holders had stood by Ripple through years of regulatory uncertainty and legal battles but had watched the company build its business around RLUSD and institutional infrastructure instead of delivering a dramatically higher XRP price. Scudu went as far as calling $15–$20 or higher XRP’s “true fair value.”
Attorney and longtime XRP commentator Bill Morgan responded with just six words: “We must be near the bottom.” Morgan later framed the comment as a sentiment observation rather than a price prediction, suggesting that extreme holder frustration has historically marked difficult market periods. XRP was trading around $1.25–$1.26 on November 2, down roughly 15% over the previous month. At $15, XRP would need to rise about 1,100% from that level; at $20, the required move would be approximately 1,500%.
Ripple’s business momentum has been substantial. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave final approval for Ripple National Trust Bank in late October, an entity that will manage reserves supporting RLUSD and provide regulated digital asset custody services. Ripple also expanded its relationship with BNY, partnered with Robinhood, and brought RLUSD to Coinbase. RLUSD has already grown to more than $2.5 billion in market value. Ripple says its product business is approaching a $900 million annualized revenue run rate and now serves more than 1,700 institutions, corporates and enterprises.
However, Ripple’s success as a private fintech company does not automatically guarantee XRP price growth. XRP is an independent digital asset traded by the market, and XRP holders do not own equity in Ripple. The two are linked through the XRP Ledger and some Ripple products, but Ripple has no obligation to engineer a specific token price.
The debate over whether RLUSD reduces XRP utility also intensified. In a separate exchange, Morgan called out what he described as an inconsistency among critics. Under RippleNet’s older payment model, XRP could be purchased as a bridge asset, transferred, and sold into the destination currency within seconds. Critics at that time often argued the rapid buy and sell made XRP transactions price-neutral and irrelevant to demand. Now, Morgan noted, many of those same critics claim greater RLUSD use will reduce demand for XRP and lessen its utility. He argued that if XRP bridge transactions were supposedly price-neutral before, replacing some of those transactions with RLUSD should not suddenly become a powerful bearish factor.
RLUSD is clearly becoming more important to Ripple. Ripple describes it as an enterprise-focused stablecoin for payments, remittances, treasury flows and settlement, and it is already integrated into Ripple Payments in some markets. Coinbase added RLUSD support across institutional and retail platforms in late October, while Standard Chartered launched institutional custody for RLUSD on the XRP Ledger earlier in the month. Ripple has also started using RLUSD for real-world settlement applications, including its work with C2FO.
Still, Morgan and the broader analysis suggest RLUSD does not simply make XRP obsolete. Ripple continues to describe XRP as a bridge asset for cross-border liquidity, and BNY recently added support for both XRP and RLUSD to its digital asset custody platform. The two assets serve different purposes: RLUSD is designed to maintain a stable $1 value, while XRP is a floating-price asset that can bridge between currencies and other assets without requiring sender and receiver to use the same stablecoin or fiat currency. The key question, therefore, is not whether RLUSD exists, but how much future payment and liquidity activity actually requires XRP.
Morgan’s argument does not prove that growing RLUSD adoption will increase XRP demand, but it does expose a weakness in one common bearish narrative. The more important debate is what new forms of XRP demand emerge as Ripple and the XRP Ledger move further into institutional finance. For now, the emotional appeal from holders and Morgan’s bottom comment highlight a widening gap between community expectations and the token’s current market performance.
