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Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Custodia Bank, delivered one of the harshest assessments yet of Ripple and the XRP ecosystem in a recent episode of the Gold Goats ‘n Guns podcast, calling into question the project’s credibility, tokenomics, and long-term viability in institutional finance. In a sweeping critique, Long stated bluntly: “It’s not going to take over. If it were going to take over, it would have taken over a long time ago.”
The conversation began with a reference to growing speculation that Ripple might be among the blockchain networks “blessed” by regulators to handle tokenized financial infrastructure. But Long pushed back hard on that narrative, saying the idea “overstates how important that network is.”
According to Long, the core issue lies in Ripple’s structural legacy. “The banks have always been suspicious of it,” she said, citing what she described as the project’s centralized architecture and flawed tokenomics. “It is a centralized network and the tokenomics are backwards.” She argued that the XRP supply model — rooted in a massive pre-mine and upfront fundraising — has permanently damaged institutional trust. “The people who extracted money up front are never going to be trusted because everybody is going to look and think that anything they do is an exit scam to try to dump on retail.”
For Long, the contrast with Bitcoin and Ethereum is stark. “The most effective tokenization platforms are the ones where there was no money up front or very little money up front,” she explained. “That’s Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
Long also interpreted Ripple’s recent pivot — with the company now launching its own regulated stablecoin — as a tacit admission of failure. “Instead of trying to sell that into the banking industry, they’re getting their own regulated financial institutions and trying to issue a stablecoin,” she said. “That’s kind of, in some ways, an admission that the base layer blockchain didn’t get the adoption they were looking for.”
Her comments come amid Ripple’s continued push into institutional markets, including efforts to obtain a US bank charter and launch a US dollar stablecoin. While these moves have been celebrated in some circles as signs of maturity and strategic adaptation, Long framed them as a fallback, noting that the original promise — to become a foundational layer for interbank settlement — had clearly not materialized. “The base layer network is not going to become the base layer of replacing SWIFT,” she said.
She also pointed to the legal and regulatory drag Ripple faced over the past several years, including the SEC’s long-running lawsuit against the company for allegedly conducting an unregistered securities offering. “That hamstrung them,” she said, while acknowledging that Ripple wasn’t alone in suffering under the Biden administration’s broader crackdown on crypto: “It didn’t hurt Ripple as much as the Fed hurt us… Everybody who was targeted by the Biden administration was hurt to varying degrees.”
When asked what network the US Treasury is most likely to choose for tokenizing US Treasuries, Long was unequivocal: “They’re not going to use Ripple. They’re going to use Ethereum. They may use Bitcoin, but the Bitcoin layer twos are not mature enough for something like that.” She cited Ethereum’s technical maturity and infrastructure readiness as the decisive factors.
The backlash from the XRP community was swift and furious. Prominent community figure Crypto Eri called the remarks “ugly tribalism,” accusing Long of conflating Ripple with the XRP Ledger, and failing to distinguish between a centralized company and a decentralized protocol. “The entire blockchain community should be deeply disappointed,” she wrote.
Digital Asset Investor, another well-known XRP supporter, tagged Ripple executives directly, suggesting the company was still on track to achieve regulatory breakthroughs. Ashley Prosper went even further, alleging that Long’s criticism may stem from frustration over Custodia Bank’s lack of a Federal Reserve master account: “Sounds like Caitlin Long is mad that Ripple will get their Fed master account before Custodia Bank.”
But Long’s criticism was not offhanded nor casual — it was pointed and rooted in her long-standing perspective on what makes blockchain infrastructure bank-grade. For her, trust, decentralization, and long-term neutrality are prerequisites — and XRP, in her view, fails on all three.
“Ripple’s been at this longer than almost anybody else and they haven’t made a lot of progress,” Long concluded. “It’s really that simple.”
