Is XRP Really the “Biggest Financial Scam”? Here’s Why That Claim Misses the Mark
A cryptocurrency researcher, Aylo, recently made waves with a strong assertion, calling XRP "the biggest financial scam the world has ever seen."
This bold statement was made in a post on X, where Aylo highlighted a significant disparity between XRP’s market value and its trading activity. According to data from DeFiLlama, XRP’s 24-hour decentralized exchange (DEX) volume was a mere $44,036, while its total value locked (TVL) stood at $80.63 million.
Despite this alarming comparison, the claim that XRP is a scam quickly drew attention and sparked debate. However, experts such as Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, offered clarifications, pointing out that Aylo’s figures only accounted for automated market makers (AMMs) on the XRP ledger.
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Additionally, a validator named Vet provided an alternative figure, suggesting a much higher volume of approximately $9 million, underscoring XRP’s potential for growth.
So, is XRP truly a scam? The short answer is no. While its DEX volume may be low compared to other platforms, this doesn’t necessarily indicate fraudulent activity. XRP wasn’t built for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications like Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain.
Instead, its primary goal is to enable fast, low-cost cross-border payments and act as a bridge currency for financial institutions. Therefore, evaluating XRP’s success based solely on TVL is misleading, as it doesn’t capture the true utility of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), which focuses on speed and scalability rather than asset locking for staking or yield farming.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
