Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Custodia Bank, delivered one of the harshest assessments yet of Ripple and the XRP ecosystem in a recent episode of the Gold Goats ‘n Guns podcast, calling into question the project’s credibility, tokenomics, and long-term viability in institutional finance. In a sweeping critique, Long stated bluntly: “It’s not going to take over. If it were going to take over, it would have taken over a long time ago.”
For Long, the contrast with Bitcoin and Ethereum is stark. “The most effective tokenization platforms are the ones where there was no money up front or very little money up front,” she explained. “That’s Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
Long also interpreted Ripple’s recent pivot — with the company now launching its own regulated stablecoin — as a tacit admission of failure. “Instead of trying to sell that into the banking industry, they’re getting their own regulated financial institutions and trying to issue a stablecoin,” she said. “That’s kind of, in some ways, an admission that the base layer blockchain didn’t get the adoption they were looking for.”
Her comments come amid Ripple’s continued push into institutional markets, including efforts to obtain a US bank charter and launch a US dollar stablecoin. While these moves have been celebrated in some circles as signs of maturity and strategic adaptation, Long framed them as a fallback, noting that the original promise — to become a foundational layer for interbank settlement — had clearly not materialized. “The base layer network is not going to become the base layer of replacing SWIFT,” she said.
When asked what network the US Treasury is most likely to choose for tokenizing US Treasuries, Long was unequivocal: “They’re not going to use Ripple. They’re going to use Ethereum. They may use Bitcoin, but the Bitcoin layer twos are not mature enough for something like that.” She cited Ethereum’s technical maturity and infrastructure readiness as the decisive factors.
But Long’s criticism was not offhanded nor casual — it was pointed and rooted in her long-standing perspective on what makes blockchain infrastructure bank-grade. For her, trust, decentralization, and long-term neutrality are prerequisites — and XRP, in her view, fails on all three.
“Ripple’s been at this longer than almost anybody else and they haven’t made a lot of progress,” Long concluded. “It’s really that simple.”
At press time, XRP traded at $2.94.
