When Hugo Philion was raising money for Flare, the blockchain network designed to bring smart contract capabilities to XRP and other assets, he kept hearing the same question from venture capitalists. “Why do you want to touch XRP?”
Philion, co-founder of Flare, recalled the reaction that says a great deal about where the smart money stood on XRP at the time and perhaps why the token has spent years trading below what its most devoted supporters believe it deserves.
“Most VCs when I was raising money for Flare were like, why do you want to touch XRP,” he said in a recent interview. “And I was like, I’m sorry you can’t see the opportunity.”
The Opportunity the VCs Missed
Approximately $200 billion worth of XRP assets were sitting largely idle, with no meaningful DeFi infrastructure built around them. No yield mechanisms. No lending markets. No smart contract ecosystem to put that capital to work.
Bitcoin had attracted dozens of teams attempting to solve the same problem, most of them poorly, producing a fractured and underperforming landscape of competing protocols. XRP had attracted almost no one. For Philion, that absence of competition was not a warning sign, it was the entire point.
“Building a new market for an asset that has never had any form of DeFi market before is tough,” he said. “It’s tough to get the wheel starting, but once it does start rotating, it gets its own momentum. And that’s what we’re seeing at the moment.”
Why Philion Is Bullish on XRP
Asked directly about his view on XRP, Philion did not hesitate. Ripple won its legal case against the SEC. The company has since acquired a series of businesses that will use the XRP Ledger as their operational infrastructure. The fundamental case for the asset is stronger today than when Flare began building on top of it.
“There’s more reason to be bullish XRP now than when I started,” he said.
His logic for Flare’s own trajectory is directly tied to XRP’s market cap. A larger XRP market means more capital available to deploy through Flare’s infrastructure, a larger total addressable market and more meaningful yield opportunities for the hundreds of billions in XRP assets currently sitting dormant. If XRP possibly reaches a $500 billion market cap, Flare simply has more to work with.
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