BitGo chief executive Mike Belshe used his podium at American Banker’s Digital Banking 2025 conference to deliver a blunt verdict on Ripple’s decade-old settlement playbook: the plan to make XRP a universal bridge currency has failed, and Ripple’s newly issued US-dollar stablecoin RLUSD is the proof.
From there he walked the audience back to 2014: “So if you go back in time in digital assets about ten years, there’s this company Ripple… They had originally decided they were going to try to tackle cross-border payments by use of their XRP token.”
Belshe then dissected the two-step conversion model—dollars into XRP, then into pesos—arguing that the extra hop doomed the scheme. “It turns out that’s two conversions, right? And USD stablecoins are just better. So in fact, Ripple just launched a stablecoin, a US-dollar-backed stablecoin.”
Stablecoins, he contended, will become the “rails across the world,” sweeping aside tokens whose only advantage is theoretical bridge liquidity. He painted an everyday retail scenario—phones tapped at farmers’ markets, interest airdropped monthly—and concluded: “It just works. It’s super simple. Peer-to-peer plus peer-to-intermediary.”
One critic mocked the clip as “comedy gold,” saying it confirmed what skeptics have argued all along.” run the juels (@nullpackets) commented: “Thanks for giving your 275K followers a chuckle on a Sunday morning like this. We all need to laugh more. Oh man, this is xrp’er comedy gold. With no sense of self-awareness – unironically posting a video that says what we’ve been saying all along – xrp bridge currency cumbersome and not needed. Tokenization and stablecoins obsolete bridge currencies. Study LINK.”
At press time, XRP traded at $2.02.
