A four-week-old interview clip of Morgan Creek Capital’s Mark Yusko—resurfaced on Wednesday by the prominent XRP advocate “Digital Asset Investor” (DAI)—reignited one of crypto’s most ritualized arguments: whether criticism of XRP is fair analysis or reflexive tribalism.
In the edited segment, Yusko jokes about “the XRP army,” then acknowledges, “I might’ve said that XRP is a scam… and I actually kind of stand by it,” before adding that price increases say more about order flow than about underlying functionality: “And the fact that an asset increases in price doesn’t mean that the functionality got better. It just means that, you know, there’s more buyers than sellers. So the price rises,” he said.
In a follow-up, he clarified that what he found “amazing” was Yusko’s willingness to say exactly what he thinks, not the idea that XRP is fraudulent.
That posture—simultaneously rejecting the “scam” label while calling XRP and Ethereum “dinosaur” coins—tracked with Melker’s public commentary and helped sustain the flare-up across Crypto-Twitter overnight. Supporters of XRP seized on the moment to argue that blanket aspersions are out of step with the project’s legal and market standing after the five-year SEC fight wound down this month.
He also pushed back on Yusko’s “king-maker” framing by noting that, for years, US authorities effectively did the opposite by singling out Ripple and its token for aggressive action. In his telling, that history undermines the idea that XRP has benefited from preferential treatment, even implicitly.
Lawyer Bill Morgan (@Belisarius2020) just commented: “A truly ridiculous take. Much anti-XRP FUD comes from the same sources. It has nothing to do with valid criticism of XRP or preference for other coins. It is deliberate FUD.”
That distinction is central to why the “scam” charge grates in 2025. The legal record does not pronounce the token itself fraudulent; it delineates when and how Ripple’s sales practices fell under securities law.
As for Yusko, his critique in the resurfaced clip is less about illegality and more about utility, politics and narrative gravity—an argument that an asset’s price ascent can be disconnected from improvements in its “functionality.”
At press time, XRP traded at $
