A bold claim is circulating again in the crypto world, and this one challenges a basic assumption most investors hold.
Macro analyst Dr. Jim Willie argues that $XRP was never designed to behave like a normal cryptocurrency. In his view, it is not competing with banks or chasing retail speculation. Instead, it is being positioned as infrastructure for large-scale institutional money movement.
He compares XRP’s role to the early days of email. Email itself did not create value through public excitement. The value emerged from the systems that quietly made it work at scale. According to Willie, XRP sits in that same category today. Not consumer-facing, not flashy, but foundational.
From this perspective, XRP is not a “coin” in the traditional sense. It is a settlement tool. If Ripple becomes a trusted compliance and messaging layer for financial institutions, XRP naturally becomes the bridge asset beneath it. In that role, price is about efficiency and capacity, not hype or speculation.
This is where his argument becomes controversial.
Willie claims $XRP ’s future price will not be discovered through open-market supply and demand on exchanges like Coinbase. He believes the price was effectively agreed upon long ago by powerful financial institutions that needed a bridge asset capable of handling massive global transfers. A low price, in his view, simply would not work at that scale.
He argues that the price had to be high by design, not to reward speculation, but to enable large-value settlement with minimal friction.
Timing, he says, is critical. Global financial systems are under pressure. Liquidity is tight, settlement delays are costly, and banks are cautious. In moments like these, infrastructure assets that already fit within the system may stop being treated as experiments.
Whether one agrees or not, the claim reframes XRP not as a trade, but as financial plumbing. And plumbing is only noticed when the system can no longer function without it.
