This is one of the few cryptocurrencies that I give a full stop ‘no’ on, and have for some time. Before I continue, I should say that Ripple Labs and their blockchain have a good business, helping financial institutions to save costs using their network. That part, I am not disputing.

What I am saying is that the currency, XRP, is basically useless in it’s market.

XRP is not competing with platforms like ETH or NEM, nor is it competing with privacy focused tokens like XMR or ZEC. Instead, they are a payment network for financial institutions. Their main competitors are projects like Hyperledger, R3 Corda and the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. Ripple and these products all solve the same problems for the same group of companies.

Here’s the problem with grouping Ripple in this market: None of Ripple’s competitors have a native asset to their platform. They solve the problem that XRP solves without the need of a similar currency. That means if I’m evaluating Ripple vs Hyperledger Fabric, one of the things I have to take into consideration is the fact that I need XRP to run Ripple’s network whereas I do not need this for Hyperledger. In a way, it’s like adding an extra step that just is not necessary.

Now, you may say that Ripple can be used for other use cases and that their platform for is permissionless allowing for anyone to use it (vs the ‘permissioned’ competitors I showed above). And technically, you’re right, but the thing is that Ripple is primarily about winning the Financial Institutions market. All the organization’s efforts are going to make the product better for financial institutions to use, and even though you could use XRP in the same way you use BTC, everyone else is using cryptocurrencies like LTC, BTC and even ETH.

Because of this, Ripple should be evaluated from the perspective of how useful it is in it’s own market, and because most of it’s competitor don’t even have an asset, at best, XRP is useless, at worst, it’s a nuisance that will push people to their competitors.

Because of this, I don’t see how it will survive long term.