BlackRock-Ripple Davos Speculation Fuels XRP Tokenization Hype

The core of the speculation stems from optics at Davos, where both BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse were present. Panel host Versan Aljarrah framed their joint presence as significant, asking guest Jake Claver for his interpretation. Claver centered his analysis on comments from Larry Fink regarding settlement consolidation in finance. “He mentioned that it would be ideal if everything was on one blockchain or at least settled back to one blockchain,” Claver said. The panel interpreted this, alongside Ripple’s longstanding presence at such forums, as indirect validation for the XRP Ledger. “For Ripple to be in the room and having been in the room for years at this point, it gives me a lot of confidence that it is the XRPL,” Claver added, concluding he feels “BlackRock and Ripple are much more involved than people realize.”

Aljarrah widened the claim, asserting it is “quite obvious” that major institutions like BlackRock and JPMorgan have “some ties” to Ripple and XRP. He and other panelists argued that the narrowing set of crypto-native executives granted access to elite forums like the WEF and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) makes Garlinghouse’s inclusion a substantive signal beyond mere “headline hype.” This perspective frames Davos not as a venue for announcements, but as a filter indicating which blockchain projects are being seriously considered by traditional finance for large-scale implementation.

Beyond the Davos stagecraft, the discussion turned to Ripple’s concrete business moves as evidence of institutional preparation. Panelist David (Digital Outlook) connected Ripple’s strategic acquisitions—such as custody specialists Metaco and Standard Custody—and partnerships as positioning the company to be a “main leader in the space.” He explicitly tied these developments to BlackRock, stating, “you see all these other linkages between their partners like what they’re doing with Blackrock. You know, they’ve got some stuff going on there.” This builds a narrative that Ripple is assembling the necessary regulatory and infrastructural pieces, including custody and clearance services, to serve large asset managers.

A second, more market-focused argument proposed that BlackRock’s involvement could be the catalyst for a major XRP price revaluation. Edo Farina framed it in terms of “order size,” suggesting that a single huge institutional order from an entity like BlackRock could be transformative, especially if executed over-the-counter (OTC), thus avoiding immediate impact on public market pricing. Jake Claver expanded this into a “supply shock” thesis. “When Blackrock steps in, there will be likely a supply shock that allows XRP to decouple from the rest of the crypto market and Bitcoin,” he said. The panel cited a past viral episode—a fake filing for a BlackRock iShares XRP ETF—that briefly caused XRP to trade independently of the broader crypto market as a precedent for such decoupling behavior.

Despite the bullish speculation, the analysis acknowledges a significant counter-narrative rooted in BlackRock’s observable actions. The asset manager’s current public crypto footprint is demonstrably tilted towards Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), not XRP. Its flagship U.S. spot crypto exposure is through exchange-traded products tracking Bitcoin (IBIT) and Ethereum (ETHA). Furthermore, BlackRock’s tokenization beachhead, the BUIDL fund, debuted on the Ethereum network via Securitize in March 2024, only later expanding to other blockchains.

Perhaps most critically, BlackRock’s own 2026 thematic outlook explicitly names Ethereum as the leading infrastructure layer that “collects the toll” as tokenization scales. The document highlights data showing “65%+” of tokenized assets reside on Ethereum, treating stablecoins as an early proxy for tokenization in action. This public stance provides a concrete basis for why institutional “one blockchain” speculation often defaults to ETH, not XRP. At the time of the panel’s discussion, XRP was trading at $1.88, a price that reflects market uncertainty amidst these competing narratives of potential adoption and current reality.