Swift’s decision to embed a blockchain-based, shared ledger into its core infrastructure has triggered a new round of soul-searching around Ripple’s strategy and the XRP Ledger’s utility. Announced at Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt on September 29, Swift framed the move as a “pivotal step” toward instant, always-on cross-border settlement at global scale—positioning its new ledger as an extension of two years of tokenization trials rather than a wholesale system replacement.
Against that backdrop, CoreNest Capital GP Bob Ras urged Ripple to rethink its roadmap. “So Ripple has been trying to replace SWIFT for years. SWIFT just added blockchain instead. The plot twist writes itself. What’s the next move? Maybe it’s the right time to pivot?” he wrote on X.
In anticipation of the expected pushback from the XRP army, he added: “Hate me or love me, the reality is, right now XRP doesn’t offer real utility beyond simple value transfers from one wallet to another. Any tokens can do that. For a project that once aimed to flip SWIFT, that’s not enough. Ripple needs a pivot toward true utility if it wants to stay relevant. MAKE XRP GREAT AGAIN!”
Ras’s remarks landed as Chainlink publicly congratulated Swift and underscored a multi-year collaboration that includes 2023 interoperability experiments using Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and Swift’s messaging rails. Chainlink called the Sibos announcement “a landmark moment,” reiterating that oracles and messaging standards can bridge banks to public and private chains without ripping out existing infrastructure.
Community replies ranged from market-cap arithmetic to claims about on-chain volume, with critics countering that high transactional throughput does not, on its own, translate into accrual of value to a token. The exchange captured a persistent fault line: does institutional adoption of bank-friendly rails and oracle networks favor neutral middleware like Chainlink more than L1 tokens whose payment-network ambitions overlap with Swift’s upgrade path?
These moves suggest a pivot toward providing liquidity and balance-sheet utilities around tokenized assets—an area Swift’s new ledger explicitly targets at the messaging layer. Whether that ends up complementary or competitive for XRP’s investment case depends on how much value accrues to the ledger (or its EVM sidechain) versus to bank-operated ledgers linked by oracles and standards.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.86.
