The ingredients of a successful blockchain ecosystem would look like the following:
- One consensus mechanism
- Four DeFi apps*
- A driven founder/figurehead
- At least one native stablecoin
- There are two legal entities: the foundation and the development studio
- One token bridge (minimum)
- Three online terminal reply men
Secret ingredients include active VC funds, NFT collection, funding rounds and mid-cap mecoins.
*Minimum required DeFi apps: DEX w/ token launchpads, lending/collateralized debt, liquid staking, oracle
So, while there are now hundreds of smart contract platforms with halfway decent market capitalizations, not all are buzzing to quite the same degree as the majors — Ethereum, Solana and BNB.
XRPL is a good example. It has almost $63 million in TVL, but none in the onchain app. Ripple labs, which was launched in 2006, is currently working on its recipe.
XRPL has the consensus system, but without the normal staking and mining. Instead, it relies on trusted validators. It already has some token bridges.
There are also two legal entities: the San Francisco-headquartered Ripple Labs and the Estonian non-profit XRP Ledger Foundation, which was recently rebranded to the Inclusive Financial Technology Foundation.
Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse obviously ticks the box for driven founder-slash-figurehead.
David Schwartz has been Ripple’s CTO for a long time and he is a strong reply guy (check).
And anyone who has ever tweeted anything remotely critique-adjacent has likely been visited by the XRP Army — which together truly harnesses the power of much more than just two reply guys (check check).
This leaves four DeFi Apps and one native stablecoin.
XRPL currently has four DeFi apps with 100 unique active wallets interacting with them daily right now — but three of them are DEXs and one is an NFT marketplace. It has a native Oracle since last month. This should attract developers.
XRPL, conveniently (as it is an exception) does not require the liquid staking application.
Only then are the two remaining ingredients a lively lending protocol, and an indigenous stablecoin.
The New York State Department of Financial Services has just given approval for the offering of Ripple USD.
This will have a similar structure to Circle’s USDT (and Tether’s USDT), and be backed with cash and other equivalents, mostly short-dated US Treasury bonds.
Robert Leshner, a DeFi veteran who has been able to support projects that are building the Ripple eco-system via his fund is open to supporting them. (VC Bonus Points!).
The pièce de résistance for XRPL would then be a roster of its own mid-cap memecoins, as is traditional fare.
They are all cooking, whether you like it or not. However, the largest is an XRP Army themed coin that has a $45.8 million (still small) market cap.
The good news is that only $15 million worth of tokens was traded at XRPL over the course of the day. Watch this number rise if RLUSD finds decent traction.
Bellisimo!
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