BitGo chief executive Mike Belshe used his podium at American Banker’s Digital Banking 2025 conference to deliver a blunt verdict on Ripple’s decade-old settlement playbook: the plan to make XRP a universal bridge currency has failed, and Ripple’s newly issued US-dollar stablecoin RLUSD is the proof.
Ripple Made RLUSD Because XRP Isn’t Needed
Speaking in a session on banking access for digital-asset firms, Belshe opened with an appeal for direct Federal Reserve accounts before pivoting to Ripple’s history. “As a stablecoin business, you don’t need it, but do you want a master account? … We’d love a Fed master account, then we get to skip the banks.”
From there he walked the audience back to 2014: “So if you go back in time in digital assets about ten years, there’s this company Ripple… They had originally decided they were going to try to tackle cross-border payments by use of their XRP token.”
Belshe then dissected the two-step conversion model—dollars into XRP, then into pesos—arguing that the extra hop doomed the scheme. “It turns out that’s two conversions, right? And USD stablecoins are just better. So in fact, Ripple just launched a stablecoin, a US-dollar-backed stablecoin.”
Stablecoins, he contended, will become the “rails across the world,” sweeping aside tokens whose only advantage is theoretical bridge liquidity. He painted an everyday retail scenario—phones tapped at farmers’ markets, interest airdropped monthly—and concluded: “It just works. It’s super simple. Peer-to-peer plus peer-to-intermediary.”
While Belshe spoke, RLUSD is quietly growing. Ripple introduced the token last December after securing New York DFS approval; by 2 April it had been integrated into Ripple Payments and had already reached a market capitalization of $244 million. Continued issuance on Ethereum pushed supply higher: on 21 June Ripple minted another 14 million RLUSD, lifting circulation toward $450 million. CoinMarketCap’s real-time dashboard now shows roughly $429 million outstanding, with daily volumes above $84 million.
Ripple rejects the premise that adopting a dollar token concedes defeat for bridge token. In a series of posts and interviews earlier this year, Ripple CTO David Schwartz argued that RLUSD supplies price-stable working capital while the token remains the ledger’s default auto-bridging asset, handling path-finding and liquidity between non-dollar pairs. Community analysts amplified the point on X, contending that RLUSD “broadens the ecosystem” rather than replaces its native coin.
Reactions to Belshe’s talk split sharply. Popular community member Crypto Eri (@sentosumosaba) who shared the video, commented via X: “This is why XRP needs: 1. SPOT ETFs 2. XRPFi 3. XRP Treasury Strategies 4. More Innovators & Builders. USD Stablecoins = LESS Conversations and therefore eating up the payments world.”
One critic mocked the clip as “comedy gold,” saying it confirmed what skeptics have argued all along.” run the juels (@nullpackets) commented: “Thanks for giving your 275K followers a chuckle on a Sunday morning like this. We all need to laugh more. Oh man, this is xrp’er comedy gold. With no sense of self-awareness – unironically posting a video that says what we’ve been saying all along – xrp bridge currency cumbersome and not needed. Tokenization and stablecoins obsolete bridge currencies. Study LINK.”
At press time, XRP traded at $2.02.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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