The long-running dispute over what XRP is actually for — not Ripple’s business model, but the token itself — exploded again on October 30, 2025, after crypto expert Scott Melker publicly asked whether the asset still has a live, defensible use case in an ecosystem now dominated by fiat-backed stablecoins.
The first major response came from community members who argued that the comparison to stablecoins is structurally wrong. The account Cripto ISO 22 said the token is not meant to compete with bank-grade or treasury-grade stablecoins. Instead, as they put it, “XRP is not competing with stablecoins it’s the liquidity bridge between them and between currencies, assets, and payment networks. While stablecoins represent value, XRP represents mobility.”
Melker challenged that logic directly. “This makes no sense to me, perhaps I’m dense,” he replied. “You can use a stablecoin as the bridge for conversions with zero loss from token volatility. Why is the token needed specifically and not another?” He later said he was still looking for something verifiable now rather than projections: “I think the core issue I have is that people are screaming at me about all of the things that ‘will’ happen but nobody can tell me what ‘is’ happening. Meanwhile, Stablecoins are eating the world.”
Weisberger’s stance is that the token’s current relevance is not the result of unstoppable external adoption, but of Ripple structurally depending on the token as collateral and liquidity inside its own stack. That argument implicitly rejects the long-standing claim that “Ripple and XRP are separate,” suggesting instead that the token is deeply tied to Ripple’s balance sheet and Prime liquidity strategy. If XRP’s price holds, Ripple can deploy it. If price collapses, Ripple’s firepower weakens.
The XRP camp answered from first principles. The account @xrpmickle argued that even asking for a “pitch” misunderstands what the token is. “The value proposition isn’t a temporary pitch — it’s foundational,” he wrote. “[The token] serves the same core purpose that many of the top cryptocurrencies do: it’s the native form of value and security layer for the distributed ledger it operates on. […] The XRP Ledger literally cannot exist or operate without XRP.”
Mickle went further, arguing that stablecoins are issued liabilities whose usefulness is inherited from the network they sit on, whereas the token is “integral — not derived.” In that telling, the token is designed to be neutral settlement-grade liquidity that can connect incompatible systems, not a bank IOU that lives inside a corporate silo.
Melker, however, drew a line between what the token is architected to be and what it is currently doing at institutional scale. “Nobody can tell me what ‘is’ happening,” he wrote, pointing to what he sees as a gap between forward-looking claims and visible corridors today. That same split surfaced in a side exchange about Bitcoin, where a critic asked what Bitcoin is “actually used for.” Melker responded: “That’s kind of the point. It doesn’t need to be used for anything.” In other words, Bitcoin can be defended as monetary premium. XRP, by contrast, is marketed as transactional infrastructure, so it lives or dies on being used.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.56.
