Michael Arrington says Ripple’s long game could lift XRP “with no upper limit,” if the company stays mission-focused and keeps executing.
Speaking on Ripple’s Onchain Economy episode published April 20, Arrington — founder of Arrington Capital — framed Ripple not as a short-term market story but as a long-duration bet on institutional crypto rails. He argued Ripple and XRP have been “completely misunderstood” over the past decade, and that the firm’s recent pushes into stablecoins, prime brokerage, acquisitions and product development are building the infrastructure that could draw startups and institutions into the XRP ecosystem.
“This is about foundational market structure,” Arrington said, stressing that hedge funds and institutional traders need more than compliance tools — they need custody, execution and other core market plumbing that traditional finance already provides. He sees Ripple’s expanding stack as making it “inevitable” more projects will build on XRP.
Arrington pointed to Ripple’s acquisition of Hidden Road — now rebranded as Ripple Prime — as a concrete example. “It’s just a prime broker, essentially,” he said. “Prime brokers are a dime a dozen in the real world, but in crypto we’ve never found one that’s very good. So it’s going to be a huge business and a backbone of what Ripple and XRP become.”
He emphasized that his view is not a speculative pitch for the token. Instead, he described a mission-driven company steadily building infrastructure that could underpin a much larger institutional market. “If Ripple, which is very mission-focused, can continue to hyperfocus on that mission and execute, there is no upper limit on the value of that ecosystem,” Arrington added.
Arrington also reflected on crypto’s earlier cycles, recalling the 2017 ICO boom that convinced him to move from traditional Silicon Valley VC work into crypto full time. He said he first bought XRP in 2017 when the token was trading around $0.03–$0.05, and believes history will eventually view XRP and Ripple as fundamental pieces of the crypto ecosystem.
Market snapshot: at press time XRP traded at $1.44.
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