A cryptocurrency researcher has come forth with a bold and troubling claim — dubbing XRP the ‘biggest financial scam the world has ever seen’.
The analyst in question, Aylo, an alpha please researcher, made the claim in a March 21 X post. At the time of the post, the XRP ledger’s 24-hour decentralized exchange (DEX) volume stood at just $44,036. In contrast, the total value locked (TVL) stood at $80.63 million, per data the researcher retrieved from DeFiLlama.
I think XRP is the biggest financial scam the world has ever seen. There has never been something which has produced less value that has reached this market cap ($140B). The XRP ledger did $44k in volume in the last 24h, according to DefiLlama.
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Unsurprisingly, the post attracted a lot of attention. Let’s cut to the chase — is XRP a scam? No — and let’s dig into exactly where the misconception could have arisen from.
First, let’s turn to Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, who responded to the post, claiming that the screenshot provided by Aylo only showed automated market makers (AMMs) on the XRP ledger.
In addition, Vet, a dUNL validator on the ledger, presented an alternate set of figures in his own reply, which put the 24-hour dex volume at closer to $9,000,000, while espousing the XRP ledger’s growth potential.
So, what’s the final verdict? The XRP ledger’s dex volume is indeed significantly lower than that of many peers and competitors — but this does not make XRP a financial scam, and is easily explainable.
Why XRP’s low dex volume does not make it a financial scam
XRP isn’t designed to compete in the DeFi sandbox. Its primary mission is to facilitate fast, cost-efficient cross-border payments and serve as a bridge currency for financial institutions. This distinction makes TVL a mismatched lens for evaluating XRP’s success.
Unlike Ethereum (ETH) or Binance Smart Chain (BSC), where smart contracts and DeFi applications dominate, XRP Ledger (XRPL) prioritizes speed and scalability over programmable features like those that underpin TVL.
The XRPL doesn’t rely heavily on locking up assets in smart contracts for staking or yield farming — activities that tend to inflate TVL numbers.
Instead, XRP’s utility lies in its ability to move value quickly across borders, often bypassing the need for prolonged asset lockups. As a result, TVL fails to capture the core dynamics of XRP’s adoption or its real-world impact.
At present, XRP is only approximately $2 billion in market capitalization away from dethroning stablecoin Tether (USDT) as the third-largest digital asset in the world, having seen its market cap increase by $100 billion in the last 365 days. In addition, it maintains a strong level of volume, as roughly $2.58 billion worth of XRP has been traded in the past 24 hours, per data retrieved by Finbold from CoinMarketCap.
At press time, XRP was changing hands at a price of $2.44, having marked a 17.03% return on a year-to-date (YTD) basis, despite a significant pullback following an initial move to the upside after the resolution of Ripple’s longstanding case with the SEC.
Analysts are also turning increasingly bullish on the digital asset. If the token manages to maintain price levels above $2.50, Bitget analyst Ryan Lee believes that a rally to $10 is inevitable.
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