XRP was originally made to facilitate the transfer of money across international borders. It can probably deal with newly-fragmented financial systems better than legacy money transfer technology can. That doesn’t mean its price is going to be rock-solid during turbulence. Cross-border payments are still, for the most part, clunky and expensive.
On the plumbing level, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) routes payments through order books and automated market makers (AMMs), which, in theory, can substantially reduce the friction of moving value between currencies, and thus across borders. So the chain is a potential workaround for a more complicated money transfer path, assuming that happens. Furthermore, assuming Ripple, XRP’s issuer, keeps onboarding new payment partners, getting permission to operate in new jurisdictions, and building out its suite of financial services that settle using XRP, global instability can strengthen the narrative that alternative settlement tools have a role. In other words, global instability, even if it’s only sporadic or just a little, will probably offer new opportunities to confirm the asset’s investment thesis.
The main problem here is that when headlines get ugly or when real economic damage starts to pile up (or when financial systems experience real breakdowns), investors often reflexively reduce their exposure to volatile assets first, like cryptocurrency. As a result, crypto rarely gets treated like a safe harbor, which becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy and ensures that turmoil hurts coin prices. There isn’t any reason to believe that XRP will be safe from this dynamic if there’s real trouble, especially not in the short term. Ripple is headquartered in the U.S., and therefore it stays entangled with U.S. policy both in terms of its material reality, and in terms of its reputation when dealing with foreign companies, regulators, and individuals.
That linkage will likely be consequential because “instability” as a world-state is not limited to big events like wars and recessions. It also includes economic actions like sanctions, trade retaliation, and politically motivated regulation. So the takeaway is that if instability looks like episode-based market stress, like the tariff mania in the U.S. in 2025, XRP will probably suffer in the near term before recovering and continuing to do fine. If, on the other hand, instability looks like a slow grind toward a permanently more fragmented landscape of payment and money transfer corridors, it has a better long-run setup.
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