A fresh bout of tribal sparring over token valuations broke out on X after CoinRoutes founder Dave Weisberger asked why XRP trades at more than ten times the market value of Chainlink’s LINK despite Chainlink’s high-profile role in financial-market infrastructure. The exchange, which followed Swift’s announcement at Sibos that it will launch a blockchain-based ledger, quickly crystallized two very different theories of “value capture” in crypto: a native asset securing and settling an L1 network versus a utility token powering oracle middleware.
What followed was equal parts token-economics debate and culture clash. Weisberger, who later clarified “To be clear, I hold both,” added that he thinks “XRP bulls are delusional in their calls,” while conceding that such delusion does not preclude outperformance versus traditional assets. His framing invited two lines of reply: the “volume and adoption” argument and the “different problem, different TAM” argument.
On the data front, one respondent, @baggins_cc, asserted that “The XRP token has a $172B market cap, while LINK has $14B (1/10th). And when looking at the last 24h, by volume, XRPL has processed $4.9B in revenue, compared to LINK, which only has processed $641M. Marketcap is absolute when it comes to ranking, and Volume is empirical & objectively a fact, when it comes to real world adoption.”
Other replies took aim at investor narratives themselves. When a commenter criticized Weisberger’s “lazy ask,” he volleyed back with a reminder that many were “talked into XRP based on SWIFT, despite no clear token economics and no definitive use case,” nodding to years of marketing-driven expectations that official banking rails would one day require XRP.
In the end, the thread does not “prove” why XRP is worth ten times LINK or vice versa; instead, it exposes a fundamental split in crypto investing frameworks. One camp prioritizes native-asset economics of base layers and their role as neutral settlement media; the other prioritizes revenue-bearing middleware whose services are indispensable to a tokenized financial system.
As the Swift news resets expectations about how legacy rails will interface with blockchains, the core question for markets remains unchanged: which designs actually trap value, and how verifiably do those mechanics funnel real-world usage into persistent demand for the token itself? On that score, the debate is far from settled.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.84.
