XRPL Has the Receipts, But Adoption Is Still Waiting for the Callback 📞

A former Ripple central bank digital currency adviser says the XRP Ledger's technical capabilities are no longer the bottleneck to institutional adoption, with practical factors like liquidity, custody, compliance and interoperability now the deciding factors. Anthony Welfare, who previously advised central banks on CBDC projects, said the ledger's speed, low transaction costs and native decentralized exchange make it well suited to payments and tokenization, but he cautioned that technical readiness and real-world use are not the same hurdle. "When you see a lot of the things that are put out about $XRP and its kind of ecosystem and Ripple as a company, and to set the stage even further there, it being this kind of like new financial system that can solve correspondent banking and that everybody can do all these use cases on and that our new financial system can run upon," Welfare said on the AllinCrypto Podcast. He emphasized that the $XRP asset is distinct from the XRP Ledger itself, meaning institutions can use ledger functions without relying on the token.

Welfare said private blockchains will likely expand first, with some activity later anchoring to public networks, and he pointed to a role for auditable records that AI agents can rely on. Stablecoins, he argued, could reduce payment friction and create new orchestration opportunities for existing players rather than eliminating them.

Several developments over the past month align with that multi-chain outlook. A European consortium is targeting euro stablecoin adoption across multiple networks, including the XRP Ledger, while the International Monetary Fund has mapped the ledger alongside other public networks in discussions of tokenized finance. Ripple has expanded partnerships, including Ripple Prime services for Brevan Howard and an integration with DriveWealth that uses RLUSD on the XRP Ledger to speed up global funding.

Evernorth, a Ripple-backed vehicle holding about 473 million XRP, debuted on Nasdaq under the ticker $XRPN this week. Shares opened at $16.68, briefly climbed to $19.38 and closed at $16.91 on Monday, October 12. Ripple, which publicized the milestone on October 14, 2026, described Evernorth as a vehicle for putting XRP to work via institutional strategies and expanding alongside the network as new capabilities are introduced.