5 Reasons Why Ripple’s XRP is Very Bad Investment

If you invest in cryptos you are most likely know this “revolutionary payment processor cryptocurrency” or “crypto coin of the banks” that is XRP, released by Ripple Labs. And while Internet rumors and general online opinion might be good, this is very bad investment.  Here’s why I advise against buying XRP.

5. Despite Internet rumors, no big company has adopted XRP as a payment processor

Underlying tech is irrelevant when it comes to cryptos. Most people gamble on cryptocurrencies, tempted by potential returns and not by final product, because in case of XRP there is none. Ripple was founded in 2012 and since 5 years they haven’t attracted a single bank that fully adopted their “payment processing” for settlements, except experimental trials.

Despite Internet claims XRP isn’t used by “Microsoft”, “Citibank” or even “VISA”. Banks have no incentive to adopt this ”scalable digital asset”, “open-source technology” which is provided by “dedicated team of world-class engineers”. This company likes to use a lot of trendy buzzwords, that’s for sure – but can’t find any major customer on their product.

4. There is no place for “cheap payment processor” on the financial market

According to Moore’s Law CPU processing power is growing exponentially, and chip performance is doubling every 18 months, so clearing payments isn’t big problem for financial institution and will be only cheaper and faster in the future.  This means there is no place for “cheap payment processor” in a market and the main proof is that Ripple haven’t convinced any bank to fully use their “revolutionary solution” beyond trials yet and will even have less chance in next years.

On a central place on the Ripple.com main page you will find a picture that supposedly depicts Ripple benefits (below). Let’s take a look at how much crap Ripple contained in a single graph:

5 Reasons Why Ripple’s XRP is Very Bad Investment

Perfect visualization of payment infrastructure problems – suitable for ca. 1986 I think! Source: Ripple.com

  • SLOW: Supposedly, payments now take 3-5 days to settle. Really? PayPal and Credit Card payments are resolved in a fraction of second and when you are buying from online store you can download your digital products instantly or get physical product delivered next day. There are now hundreds of other similar regional payment systems like Chinese Alipay, Russian Yandex Money or Polish PayU that allows instant transfers. Hell, I get wire transfer payments from Hongkong –  delivered in 4 hours, which this is the slowest payment method available! So if you claim that payments take 3-5 days, that’s simply a bullshit.

 

  • UNRELIABLE: “High failure rates” – Have you ever had a “bank failure” that you had to explain in bank and you didn’t get your payment? Clearing systems have so sophisticated error and verification systems that there is almost no possibility of faulty transfer, unless an error has been made by user – like sending money to wrong account number or fast payment address.

 

  • UNACCEPTABLE: “People demand a seamless and elegant experience”. What does it even mean? Who are these “people”? What is this “elegant experience”? Why payments are now “unacceptable”? And more importantly, why do you allow marketing intern Stacy to write such meaningless ad slogans? Payments are now as simple as possible and have never been easier to do. Solutions like PayPal OneTouch or Amazon 1-Click Ordering makes it a 5-seconds process and even if you have wire transfer to do, you can log into your bank account system and do it in less than a minute. Is this “unacceptable” to anyone?

 

  • EXPENSIVE: They didn’t even provide a source, just “World Trade Organization” and “Federal Reserve”, so you can doubt this $1,6 trillion figure as well. Costs are important element of bank payment clearings for banks – but constant growth of processing power and cheaper bandwidth makes it less of a problem with each passing year. If Ripple couldn’t find a single client for their payments processing in last 5 years, good luck finding one in the future.

3. There is big lawsuit pending against Ripple

Ripple has just been sued by R3 Holdco LLC over options contract. This former Ripple partner claims, that the company unilaterally terminated their contract (by e-mail, which is very unprofessional) and now wants up to $1 bln from Ripple. Such big amount of money might prompt Ripple to release even more XRP to markets, further diluting its price. And they can dump all they want want.

2. Ripple Labs can release any amounts of XRP to markets, because it’s centralized currency

According to https://ripple.com/xrp-portal:

“…we will engage in distribution strategies that we expect will result in a stable and strengthening XRP exchange rate against other currencies.”

“…we expect our company to hold approximately 50 billion XRP by the end of 2021. This schedule is indicative and discretionary.”

Which exactly means, that they can dump any amount they want and are announcing additional “50 billion XRP in a few years”, with “discretionary manner” (read: however we want, because we own it). If you believe in decentralized cryptocurrencies and that’s your reason for investing in this coin, well, you’re in wrong place because XRP is worse than fiat in this regard, as unlike Bitcoin, Ripple holds total power over supply and can inflate market with their virtual coins as they see fit. Central banks have at least strict rules regarding money printing.

XRP is corporate cryptocurrency – but you shouldn’t call it crypto then, but maybe “corporate fiat”.

1. XRP capitalization is falling rapidly

So how big is XRP virtual coin in terms of market cap? Comparing to NASDAQ stocks, entire capitalization (worth of “coins” in USD) is less than 1% Apple or 2% Exxon Mobil capitalization. On top of that, XRP capitalization fell more than 50% since May 2017, which means that buyers faith in this online coin is dropping rapidly. It’s tiny, because no one cares and institutional investors aren’t interested in buying it.

XRP coin capitalization fell

XRP coin capitalization fell from 15,2 bln to 7 bln in just 4 months (coinmarketcap.com)

And for Ripple’s sake let’s not even talk about the price. In just last 4 months XRP price fell by more than 30% and there doesn’t seem to be end of this – unless Ripple manipulates market by releasing more coins.

xrp drop in price

And if you look at the technicals for daily charts, its carnage: almost all indicators suggests selling. You can tell just from technical price analyisis that it’s an asset highly unsuitable for buying and holding and its outlook look bleak.

xrp ripple technical indicators

But where can I sell it?

There are several exchanges that allows you to sell cryptocurrencies. My top pick is eToro that allows you to put unleveraged shorts on crypto CFDs, with many cryptos available for selling. eToro is simple to use and provides web-based user interface with demo account, so I highly recommend it especially to beginners. You can also copy my trades directly through copy-trading feature. Banking on greed is easy!

Disclaimer: Cryptocurrencies can fluctuate widely in prices and are therefore not appropriate for all investors. Trading cryptocurrencies is not supervised by any EU regulatory framework.

I provide advisory, consulting, SEO services, financial content and marketing stunts for the industry. Among my clients are banks, brokers, crypto and fintech entities, encompasing Fortune 500 companies. I held various managerial positions, including CCO.

28 Comments

  1. Thanks for the XRP information which sounds quie factual when sifting throught all the crypto hype….just started trading on etoro with some indicies ,stocks and cryptos.. will possibly start copying/following some of your trades with etoro and the top 5 or so traders….
    Thanks again

  2. Thank you for your article on Ripple and XRP. Can you please share some of your success stories in which you called out a company to fail… or even succeed, a year or two in advance? Please support this call with something we can verify on the web. Thank you in advance, and I look forward to you sharing your success stories in order to lend your article on Ripple credibility.

  3. You have no clue what your talking about! Lol, you should do alot deeper research prior to opening up your mouth! XRP to rhe moon mofo

  4. Very insightful. Would you please give us more details on why banks aren’t using this technology yet?
    Also, it’s the technology behind it that is useful, what is the coin itself good for?
    Thank you.

    • Because of the reasons stated in the article. Many crypto dev flat out lie. Visa transactions are fast! Even a total idiot must accept that fact. So, does Ripple have an advantage over Visa? NO!

      • advantage over Visa? NO. but it’s not the point : XRP have an advantage over BTC, TLC or ETH. It’s realy fast, compared of the other crypto.

        • It’s not even comparable to BTC or other cryptos, because it’s not blockchain, but ICO, a kind of stocks that can be printed in any numbers like Zimbabwean Dollars, because there is no regulation for crap like ICO in US (yet). People have no idea what they are buying.

          • The more you write about xrp the more stupid you sound. Take this article down because you are incorrect on 99% of your points. Buy xrp now or cry later.

      • What about all of the personal information that is tied to every online CC purchase? There’s a privacy issue to be made with cryptos. Isnt that a large part of their genesis in the first place?

  5. Correct me if I’m wrong but Moore’s Law is no longer a law. Chip makers for several years have reverted to other means in order to increase chip performance. Simply making transistors smaller is no longer feasible which is the basis for the exponential increase predicted by Moore’s Law.

    • Transistor gates can still be reduced and effectively work, though in a few years it won’t be possible anymore, because of physical properties of semiconductors – at really small gate size (7 nm, currently smallest chips have about 10 nm) resistance grows too much to conduct low current. So this development will be halted, unless we”l come up with working quantum processors.
      Intel engineers estimate that actual current performance doubles in a two and half years.

  6. I wonder who will ever buy an XRP coin from an investor, other than another investor?

    Ripple is “releasing” 1 billion per month but they are releasing them to their customers, it appears, at an average rate of 300 million per month with the remaining 700 million going back to the pool to be “released” later. Banks, when they buy XRapid, are going to get enough coins from Ripple Labs with the product when delivered, right? Ripple Labs won’t deliver the software and then tell the banks they need to open Bittrex accounts and buy coins at unknown prices and availability from investors. Of course not. Banks get the software and the coins needed for the product in one package.

    And if a bank needs more coins, they won’t go onto Bittrex, they’ll call their account rep at Ripple Labs and tell them they need more coins. There are billions of them unused at Ripple Labs. So banks will get coins for probably free. And Ripple Labs will have enough coins to hand out for at least 6 years. And then? Well, time for a new coin with 50 billion new pre-mined coins. Their new software will, of course, require this new coin (XRP 2.0) and all coins held by investors would be even more useless.

    It seems to me that the only ones who will ever buy XRP from investors are other investors, potentially. That no coin held by any investor will ever find itself as part of a financial transaction, other than being traded. Am I missing something?

    • No, you don’t miss anything. You simply exposed nonsense that is XRP – a virtual currency that bank must buy in order to conduct transactions. That’s really stupid.

      How many coins were currently “destroyed” that way? Zero. Because no bank is using it and no financial institution will adopt it, despite claims from Ripple and their circlejerk that it will “soon” replace SWIFT. And by the way, that’s the evidence that no financial institution gives a shit and that no bank transfer were made that way.

      • You are now missing that the payment provider Moneygram and Cuallix use it. Oh an that the Japan consortium of 51 banks tried it successfully and will release the result before end of January.

        • No one uses this crap, because no XRP has been destroyed this way. It’s a “FUD” as you like to call it, and everyone can check it easily on Coinmarket.

        • Has that report from the Japanese banks been released? It’s now Feb and you mention “release before the end of January”? Here in Japan which I’m told is the first country to accept and begin to regulate crypto and ahead now of the rest of the world as the only country where the government has accepted and begun to regulate and incorporate crypto as part of it’s financial system, xrp is riding a tide of interest from the ordinary citizen who is just hearing about “bitcoin and the world of crypto currency” for the first time. I don’t know enough to speculate on where this will take ripple, but I do know that after bitcoin, it is probably the name of a cryptocurrency most often mentioned or recognized by the non-financially educated man-in-the-street.

  7. The more I read about Ripple sounds like a rip-off. This is fiat currency 2.0, everything that most of got in to crypto and block chain ripple/xrp is not. A good way for the owners to stash BTC and ETH. The fools and the greedy will end up in their slave jobs 9-5. Thanks for being bold and exposing this.

  8. Since the last post in January things have changed. Have any of your personal and professional opinions changed in regards to Ripple ? Seems like a lot of hype lately

  9. how do you feel about ripple and xrp now? still a shitcoin? just curious about your thoughts on the matter now that its almost a year later

    • Excellent analysis. The price is tanking as we speak and since writing this there are several more lawsuits pending claiming that investors of XRP were misled and that it represents a security. The model is horrible. The value of an open and distributed ledger is that communities decide the path forward for the network – not a single business. The XRP fanboys seem to be in a catch 22. They cheer on Ripple Labs a central authority who will save the day, without acknowledging that Ripple labs only cares about the price so that they can trade it for fiat and expand their business. Meanwhile, they also constantly come to Ripple’s defense saying it is going to be more decentralized than bitcoin soon and that they are in fact a great open source cryptocurrency. Which is it? Is it a centrally controlled and developed technology for private gain or is it a fully open protocol where folks can influence Ripple on the direction that they block chain takes?

  10. I find your analysis dangerous, I realize that you have bought only one position by cryptos, maybe to create a buzz and increase your traffic on your blog. Have you thought that if people follow your reasoning and are wrong, He may regret it all their life?

  11. You are an idiot and have NO IDEA what you are talking about. You must be a Bitcoin or Etherium guy who will be broke after XRP destroys all the inferior cryptos.

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