Why Peter Brandt Still Won’t Call XRP An Investment: ‘Useful Doesn’t Mean Valuable’

Veteran trader Peter Brandt is standing firm on his long-held skepticism about XRP, even as the token racks up bank partnerships around the world, and his argument comes down to one basic question nobody’s answered yet.

Asked whether growing institutional partnerships have shifted his long-standing view of XRP, veteran trader Peter Brandt didn’t budge. His issue isn’t with XRP’s utility, it’s with a question he says remains unanswered: what happens to XRP’s supply over time.

“What’s the supply of XRP? Will we have expansion of the supply?” Brandt asked. “There’s things we don’t know about XRP.”

Being Useful Isn’t The Same As Being Valuable

Brandt’s argument centers on a distinction he thinks gets lost in XRP discussions: transactional usefulness doesn’t automatically translate into investment value. He compared XRP directly to the US dollar, an asset that’s used constantly for transactions worldwide, yet nobody buys dollars as a speculative investment because it’s transactional. “Just because something is transactional, that doesn’t mean automatically that it must be more valuable,” Brandt said.

He argued that real value only gets established once a market can clearly identify when an asset is overpriced or underpriced, something he says XRP hasn’t demonstrated yet. Bitcoin, in his framing, sidesteps this problem entirely because it isn’t competing as a transactional currency, it’s positioned purely as a store of value. “We don’t have that in Bitcoin because it is not a transactional coin,” he said. “You have to separate those two.”

Bitcoin Isn’t Immune Either

Brandt didn’t spare Bitcoin from long-term uncertainty. He pointed to quantum computing as a genuine future risk, not to individual wallets or exchange-held funds at custodians like Fidelity, Kraken, or Coinbase, but to Bitcoin’s underlying cryptographic architecture itself. “You hack the basic architecture of Bitcoin once with quantum computing, and I want to be short everything in the world on Bitcoin, because it’s going down really hard,” he said.

He also floated the idea of future blockchain systems building transactional layers directly on top of Bitcoin as a store-of-value base, suggesting today’s rigid categories, store of value versus transactional coin versus what he calls “gimmick coins”, may eventually blur as the technology matures.