Exclusive: XRP Could Become Crypto’s Top Asset, But Only If Banks Do This First

XRP’s next major re-rating will not come from retail traders chasing headlines, according to blockchain researcher Edo Farina. It will come from banks quietly parking the token on their balance sheets.

In an interview with Coinpedia, Farina, founder of Alpha Lions Academy, laid out a case that XRP has already shown flashes of behaving like an institutional asset rather than a typical altcoin. The real proof point, he said, is still ahead.

The performance gap

Farina pointed to a stretch when Bitcoin traded near $50,000 and XRP sat below $0.40. Months later, Bitcoin climbed above $100,000, roughly doubling from its cycle low. XRP, over the same window, surged past $3.

“This was a small demonstration that XRP doesn’t need Bitcoin to reach extreme new highs to significantly outperform,” Farina said.

That move put XRP ahead of most of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by performance. Farina said the shift is only getting started. “Tomorrow, when institutions begin holding XRP as treasury liquidity or settlement collateral, valuation models change completely,” he said.

Utility beyond the bridge-asset story

Asked for the strongest proof that XRP has real utility beyond serving as a bridge currency, Farina did not point to a single catalyst.

“For me it’s the convergence of multiple trends,” he said.

He cited Ripple’s regulatory relationships across multiple jurisdictions, the XRP Ledger’s native decentralized exchange running since 2012, its escrow and low-cost settlement functions, and the live status of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin. He also noted rising bank interest in tokenized deposits and stablecoins, alongside discussions at the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements around tokenized financial markets.

“No single announcement ‘proves’ XRP wins,” Farina said. “It’s the direction of the industry that makes me bullish.”

What decoupling actually looks like

Farina drew a sharp line between short-term outperformance and genuine decoupling from Bitcoin’s cycle.

“Not simply outperforming Bitcoin for a few months,” he said. “The real signal would be XRP responding primarily to institutional adoption rather than Bitcoin cycles.”

He tied this back to XRP’s original design purpose: eliminating the need for pre-funded nostro and vostro accounts, a structure he said traps trillions of dollars in dormant liquidity worldwide.

“When institutions begin using XRP at scale for that purpose, that’s when I’d argue it has truly decoupled from Bitcoin’s cycle and become a standalone institutional asset,” Farina said.

He went a step further on where that could lead. “That’s when I’d say XRP has become its own macro asset instead of just another altcoin, and eventually becomes the number one asset in the entire crypto space.”