Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan has laid out why financial advisors are buying Ripple’s native token, and the reasons have little to do with it price.
His remarks follow an 80% rise in XRP ETF net assets during the third quarter, to a record $1.77 billion on September 25.
XRP Will Always Be Around
Hougan called XRP “one of the Mount Rushmore assets in crypto” and gave two reasons it appeals to investors. The first is that they are confident it won’t go away.
“A lot of financial advisors look at crypto and wonder, ‘Are these things for real? Will they persist? Will they be here in the future?’ And XRP has this enormous track record and this enormous background that gives people confidence it will be there in the future,” Hougan explained.
The second reason is practical. XRP “fits into real-world applications that they can understand,” according to the CIO. Advisors follow the stablecoin space and the cross-currency and liquidity space, and pay attention to news such as Ripple getting a bank charter.
XRPL community figure Hussein Zangana, who goes by Vet on X, made a related case, calling the network “real” and adding that it “has persisted the most amount of scrutiny any crypto has received.” As CryptoPotato reported earlier, XRP ETFs took in about $76 million last week, their best week in a month, extending the run to 11 straight weeks of inflows.
Bitwise’s fund leads with $677 million in cumulative inflows, followed by Franklin’s at $501 million, while the one from 21Shares has so far bled $21.15 million. On Monday, SoSoValue data shows, Canary’s XRPC added $3.96 million, taking cumulative inflows across all XRP ETFs to $1.79 billion. Total net assets were $1.68 billion, below Friday’s record level.
In related news, Bitwise filed an updated prospectus on September 28 for its XRP fund, which charges a 0.34% fee and holds its coins with Coinbase Custody. This is because, as analyst Xaif Crypto noted, the ETF keeps issuing new shares, so the prospectus has to stay current.
XRP Price Watch
At the time of writing, XRP was trading around $1.50, up about 2% in 24 hours, almost 7% in the last 14 days, and nearly 8% across the past month. However, it’s still 47% lower than where it was a year ago and 59% below its all-time high of $3.65.
The Ripple token is on track for a third straight green month, having gained about 30% in August and a more modest 2.10% in July, something Xaif Crypto reminded has rarely happened in bear markets.
The last time XRP had a longer run of consecutive monthly gains was in 2023, when it went on a run from September to December that year, which was broken by an 18% drop in January 2024.
The post Bitwise CIO Explains XRP’s Institutional Appeal After 80% ETF Jump appeared first on CryptoPotato.
