Bitgo CEO: ‘Ripple proves with RLUSD the failure of XRP’

XRP has been attributed a golden future for years. Those expectations are based on the idea that cross -border payments can facilitate quickly and cheaply. According to Mike Belshe, CEO of CryptoPafding company Bitgo, Ripple is unable to fulfill that goal. According to him, the RLUSD, the own stablecoin of the crypto company, is the living proof of that.

Rlusd ‘works better’

Belshe spoke during the Digital Banking 2025 conference in Texas. During his presentation, he mentioned the failure of Ripples original vision to reform the international payment transactions with XRP. The CEO took its audience back to 2014, the year in which Ripple started with the idea of ​​streamlining cross -border transactions through their own digital currency. The ultimate goal? The current standard for international payments, swift, replaced. That system can now take days.

The plan was to convert dollars to XRP and then to the desired local currency, whether that is euros, pesos or other dollars. But according to Belshe there is exactly the problem: “Those are two conversions,” he said. “And Stablecoins, such as RLUSD, simply do this better.” This token was launched in December last year and, like many Stablecoins, is 1 on 1 covered by the dollar. He also supplements: “People don’t want any complexity for payments.” In his presentation, he therefore sketches a future in which Stablecoins, including RLUSD, become the standard worldwide. From small purchases in the supermarket to international trade.

Ripple denies

Whether Belshe is right is a second. The Stablecoin is still very small relatively. The total market capitalization of RLUSD is ‘only’ 428 million dollars. For comparison: XRP has a total value of $ 119.2 billion. Other stablecoins such as USDT and USDC are still many times greater, with a market capitalization of nearly 156 billion dollars and $ 61.2 billion respectively.

Moreover, Ripple does not agree with Belshe. According to CTO David Schwartz, XRP still plays an important role as an automatic bridge between different currencies on the network. The RLUSD-Stablecoin is intended as a stable reserve, especially for companies, and not to replace XRP.