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Ahmed Barakat
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Jesse of Apex Crypto is in the news as he argues that XRP is being deliberately held down in price. His primary exhibit is a 2021 Citibank document that originally used the phrase “Regulated Internet of Value” before the terminology was quietly shifted to “Regulated Liability Network.” According to him, this change was made because the original wording made the connection to Ripple too obvious.
XRP’s price history gives the argument its surface credibility. The token reached $3.84 during the 2018 bull run and touched $3.60 earlier in the current cycle. Between those two peaks, it spent the better part of a decade moving sideways while Bitcoin compounded far higher.
For a token with Ripple’s institutional reach and the Interledger Protocol’s design ambitions, this flat trajectory is, at minimum, a question worth asking. The Regulated Liability Network, as described by Citibank’s Tony McLaughlin, is a shared ledger framework for tokenized bank deposits. It’s a concept that sits structurally close to what Ripple has been building toward since the company’s founding.
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Beyond XRP News: The Citibank Document and the Institutional Incentive Logic
Jesse’s argument runs as a causal chain: Citibank published a 2021 document using the “Regulated Internet of Value” phrase that maps directly onto Ripple’s own Internet of Value thesis and the Interledger Protocol. Later, Citi reissued the concept under the name “Regulated Liability Network,” stripping the Ripple association in the process.
The chain extends further. McLaughlin has publicly described the Regulated Liability Network and the shared ledger concept as the same idea. The Bank for International Settlements has separately discussed a unified ledger architecture that could replace correspondent banking infrastructure and eventually displace SWIFT as the backbone of cross-border settlement.
Jesse’s logic: if XRP or a derivative of Ripple’s protocol sits underneath that infrastructure, the last thing institutional architects want is a wildly volatile asset.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has publicly stated in the news that XRP multi-billion-dollar daily volume makes it too liquid for any single entity to control, and Ripple CTO David Schwartz has pointed out that XRP’s performance tracks other large-cap altcoins.
Crucially, the SEC’s roughly 18-month investigation before its 2020 enforcement action produced no findings of price manipulation by Ripple. Jesse does not present hard evidence of coordinated suppression; his case rests on document interpretation and circumstantial institutional linkages, not disclosed trading records or regulatory filings.
The question, as Jesse himself frames it, remains unresolved. But the crypto research community has taken note: pattern-matching between institutional settlement infrastructure and XRP’s decade of flat performance is no longer a fringe exercise.
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