Arrington Says XRP Has Been Misread for a Decade



 Michael Arrington has been in this trade since XRP traded between 3 and 5 cents. That was 2017. Most people in crypto either hadn't heard of it or were actively dismissing it as a banking coin with no place in a decentralized world. He bought anyway.

That backstory matters now because of what Ripple has actually built in the years since. The company closed a $1.25 billion acquisition of prime broker Hidden Road in October 2025, rebranded it Ripple Prime, and turned it into the first global multi-asset prime brokerage owned by a crypto company. It clears over $3 trillion per year across more than 300 institutional clients. BNY Mellon is the reserve custodian for RLUSD, Ripple's stablecoin, which is being built into the collateral structure of the platform.

Arrington sat down with RippleXDev's Onchain Economy series this week and said what he has essentially been saying for eight years — that critics of XRP built their arguments on a fundamental misreading of what Ripple was trying to do. He used the word misunderstood, but the subtext was clearer than that. He was saying the critics watched the same decade of execution and still drew the wrong conclusion.

His argument for Ripple Prime is straightforward. Traditional hedge funds have sophisticated tools, prime brokers, clearing infrastructure, real collateral rails. Crypto never had a working version of that. Ripple Prime is an attempt to close that gap at scale, and based on early numbers, it is growing fast. Ripple Prime's business reportedly tripled between the deal announcement and close.

For investors paying attention to where institutional crypto infrastructure is being built, this is worth following closely.

The full breakdown of what Arrington said and what Ripple Prime's structure actually looks like is covered over at CryptoNewsLive.org. The piece includes his direct comments from the Onchain Economy episode, Ripple Prime's current clearing volumes, and the broader $2.45 billion acquisition picture that explains where Ripple is placing its bets.

Read the full article at CryptoNewsLive.org.

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