Investment Firm CEO Drops Utility Bomb On XRP, Is Community Hype A Detriment?
Comments from Galaxy Digital’s management have seemed into what finally sustains worth within the crypto market. In a current YouTube dialogue centered on 2026 expectations for Bitcoin, crypto, and synthetic intelligence, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz and Head of Research Alex Thorn singled out XRP and Cardano, questioning whether or not even the strongest communities can survive if actual utilization fails to increase when customers have an unlimited variety of alternate options to select from.
Galaxy Digital Leadership Raises Questions About Community Versus Utility
During the YouTube discussion, Mike Novogratz offered the utility debate by the lens of capital allocation. He defined that the actual query is what an investor chooses when offered with many viable choices. If capital can circulation into one thing like SpaceX, then crypto belongings should compete on related grounds.
He acknowledged that XRP and Cardano both have deeply dedicated communities, however questioned whether or not that loyalty could be sustained if customers don’t see any actual utility with these ecosystems. “Can Ripple maintain it collectively? Can Cardano maintain it collectively?” Novogratz stated.
In drawing comparisons, Novogratz referenced Charles Hoskinson, noting his success in sustaining Cardano’s neighborhood over time regardless of it being a “blockchain that folks don’t actually use quite a bit.” He made related observations about XRP’s following, which has a powerful neighborhood. However, he posed a direct query about sustainability: “Can you retain it collectively when there are increasingly choices?”
Recent crypto market dynamics have triggered capital flows to become more selective. Developers and groups behind blockchain ecosystems all know this, and for this reason there was a race to reveal utilization, income fashions, or clear worth flows tied on to their tokens. According to Novogratz, that doesn’t occur in a single day. It’s most likely a year-long course of, not a one to three-month course of.
Cardano And XRP Proving Real-World Relevance
The questions raised in the course of the Galaxy Digital dialogue arrive at a time when each Cardano and XRP are actively making an attempt to strengthen their utility narratives. Recent occasions have seen Cardano trying to strengthen its sensible relevance by initiatives like the Midnight sidechain. Midnight is a privacy-focused Cardano sidechain community designed to assist confidential sensible contracts and selective knowledge disclosure.
Midnight is meant as a strategy to entice enterprise and institutional use instances that require compliance-friendly privateness, an space the place public blockchains have historically struggled.
XRP, then again, is taking a special path through Ripple’s hard work to extend the utility of the XRP Ledger. Ripple has been increasing utility round Ripple USD (RLUSD), its US dollar-backed stablecoin, together with broader deployment throughout a number of Layer-2 networks.
Ripple has additionally been on a partnership spree this yr in strikes to strengthen the utility of the XRP ecosystem, with about $4 billion spent on main acquisitions in 2025. The firm also recently partnered with Doppler Finance to discover collaboration in XRP-based yield infrastructure and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization on the XRP Ledger, which is one other added utility.