Overview

• Schwartz argued that Circle’s Arc and reports of Stripe’s Tempo validate blockchain’s role in finance and contrasted those networks with XRPL’s public, permissionless foundation and opt-in compliance controls.
• He highlighted XRPL’s financial-grade settlement design, citing deterministic finality and low, predictable fees that burn XRP without a separate gas token.
• He clarified that the validator initiative is his personal project separate from Ripple’s core operations to support governance decentralization.
• On-chain metrics show XRP’s value has climbed nearly 600% since November while transaction volumes and total value locked have fallen significantly.
• Grape, an XRPL validator operator, reported repeated transfers of over 140,000 XRP between exchanges like Bitget and Binance, prompting concerns about possible market manipulation.