The debate over whether Ripple’s stablecoin RLUSD is slowly cannibalising XRP’s utility has circulated through the crypto community for months. Versan Aljarrah, founder of Black Swan Capitalist, has a different view entirely, and he makes it with conviction.
RLUSD and XRP Are Not Competing. They Are a Two-Part System.
In an interview with Coinpedia, Aljarrah has addressed this question publicly over a hundred times by his own count, and his answer has not changed. RLUSD is a complementary liquidity layer, not a replacement for XRP. The two assets serve structurally different functions on the same ledger.
“RLUSD brings the easy dollars that institutions want,” Aljarrah told Coinpedia exclusively. “XRP remains the engine that moves value across systems efficiently. They expand the total addressable market rather than compete for the same slice.”
His argument is that RLUSD acts as a regulated, stable on-ramp that gives institutions the comfort they need to put capital onto the XRP Ledger in the first place. Once that capital is on the ledger and needs to move across currencies or jurisdictions, it requires a neutral bridge asset for efficient routing.
That role, Aljarrah says, belongs to XRP. Every RLUSD transaction moving into another currency creates demand for XRP as the intermediary. Activity on the ledger also burns XRP in fees, creating a direct deflationary effect from increased stablecoin volume.
How the Liquidity Model Actually Works
Aljarrah explained that the XRPL was designed with this tension in mind from the start. The ledger operates on a two-tier liquidity model. Retail participants earn yield by providing liquidity in public AMM pools. Institutions, however, do not rely on those same retail pools. They access deeper, more stable liquidity through direct ledger integration, over-the-counter arrangements, and private liquidity facilities.
As institutional volume grows on the ledger, it increases overall fee generation and improves routing efficiency, which actually makes providing liquidity more attractive for retail participants over time rather than less. The system separates high-frequency institutional pathways from yield-generating public pools while allowing both to coexist and benefit from overall network growth.
The First Real Use Case to Watch
When asked which corridor or institution will first demonstrate XRP’s role in commodity settlement in a verifiable, documented way, Aljarrah pointed to Japan and non-dollar energy trade.
“I’d watch for the first documented on-chain settlement where a tokenized or stablecoin representation of energy or commodity value is bridged using XRP between two non-USD currencies or payment systems,” he said. “It will probably start small and show up through corporate or regulatory disclosures rather than through big marketing announcements.”
His reasoning centres on the post-OPEC fragmentation of energy trade and the growing desire among Middle Eastern producers and Asian buyers to reduce reliance on traditional correspondent banking and dollar clearing. Once one corridor proves reliable and cost-effective at scale, others will follow quickly because the infrastructure friction is already being removed and the regulatory support from central banks and financial institutions is already in place.
The Decoupling Signal Is Already Visible
Aljarrah was asked what the first measurable signal of XRP decoupling from Bitcoin would look like, given that he has predicted this decoupling happens gradually then suddenly. His answer was direct.
“The signal has been visible for some time if you look beyond the price,” he said. “Regulatory clarity, infrastructure development, and institutional integration are being built specifically around the XRP Ledger, not around Bitcoin.”
When payment providers, banks, and central bank experiments route through or reference XRPL capabilities while treating Bitcoin primarily as a reserve asset, that is the decoupling in action. The market, he argues, intentionally misprices strategically important assets during the build-out phase. This creates what he described as a classic dynamic where everyone sees it coming but most still get positioned too late.
“The gradual phase is the quiet infrastructure work,” Aljarrah said. “The sudden phase arrives when real volume forces the market to reprice the asset based on actual usage rather than narrative correlation.”
Integration and Disruption at the Same Time
On the question of whether Ripple can simultaneously embed XRP into existing financial infrastructure while the underlying ledger disrupts that same infrastructure, Aljarrah sees no contradiction.
“Ripple can embed XRP into current infrastructure while the underlying ledger continues to offer efficiency gains that legacy players will eventually have to adopt or compete against,” he said. “It is not a contradiction. It is a multi-phase strategy.”
One layer works within existing systems to gain adoption and volume. Another layer uses the technology’s ability to reduce friction and counterparty risk in ways that gradually shift power dynamics. Both operate simultaneously on different time horizons.
