XRP Gains Traction as Advisors Field Client Questions, Big Firms Test Network

According to Grayscale Investments, financial advisors across the United States are consistently fielding questions from clients about XRP. Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, Head of Product and Research at Grayscale, noted that these discussions often place XRP just behind Bitcoin in terms of frequency and interest within the advisor community. This represents a notable shift in conversations that were once almost exclusively focused on Bitcoin. However, as Sharif-Askary and sales desk reports clarify, this vocal curiosity does not automatically equate to substantial capital inflows. The role of firms like Grayscale is to track this demand through sales and research channels, monitoring whether persistent questions evolve into actionable investment products.

The growing advisor interest underscores XRP’s enduring presence in the crypto narrative, largely fueled by community enthusiasm and media headlines. Yet, the path from curiosity to invested capital involves significant hurdles, including supply considerations, custody arrangements, and the development of regulated product wrappers. For now, the sustained questioning indicates deepening mainstream awareness and a broadening of the crypto dialogue beyond the dominant Bitcoin narrative, even if the financial implications remain in a preliminary stage.

Parallel to the advisor discussions, major players in finance and payments are conducting exploratory work on the XRP network. Reports link financial giant BlackRock and payments leader Mastercard to pilot projects testing tokenized instruments and settlement flows. These trials are designed to assess whether the network’s on-chain liquidity and programmable money capabilities can streamline traditional, multi-step financial processes. The work is explicitly at a testing scale; it is not yet routine operation, and public information is largely limited to proof-of-concept announcements.

This institutional vetting focuses heavily on the underlying ledger’s technical features. The network’s transaction pace and fee structure have been closely examined, as these are critical factors for large-scale enterprise adoption. Furthermore, the ledger includes native features appealing to conventional finance, such as Automated Market Maker (AMM)-like mechanics, an on-ledger exchange, and trust line tools that can be adapted for compliance purposes. It is these enterprise-grade features that have made firms like BlackRock and Mastercard willing to run initial, confidential pilots.

The push toward tokenization—representing real-world assets on a blockchain—is a central theme in these institutional experiments. Last year, asset manager Franklin Templeton and Singapore-based bank DBS participated in tokenized fund work on the XRP network. Their pilots tested how regulated assets might flow on-chain with the goal of achieving better liquidity. The results were described as mixed but instructive, revealing both the potential and the persistent challenges of this technology.

On the positive side, the trials demonstrated that tokenization can significantly shorten settlement windows, a major efficiency gain for traditional finance. However, they also highlighted that complex legal frameworks and custody questions take considerable time to resolve. Collaboration is key to this process: firms like Securitize have worked to bridge traditional fund shares to on-chain representations, while crypto exchange Gemini was named in pilots attempting to convert fund exposure into a liquid on-chain form. These collaborative efforts between market infrastructure teams and specialist firms are gaining traction, focusing on enabling fund-share swaps and stablecoin payment rails.

The current narrative around XRP and its network is thus bifurcated. On one side is the optimism and demand signal generated by persistent questions from retail clients to their financial advisors, with Grayscale tracking XRP as a top-tier topic of discussion. On the other is the measured, pragmatic world of institutional pilot testing, where giants like BlackRock, Mastercard, Franklin Templeton, and DBS are conducting real but limited experiments.

This phase is less about immediate, massive capital deployment and more about validation and learning. The network is being stress-tested for its enterprise utility in tokenization and settlement, while the market gauges genuine, investable demand for the XRP token itself. The outcome of these parallel tracks—sustained retail interest and successful institutional infrastructure proofs—will determine whether the current attention translates into the next stage of adoption or remains a chapter of promising yet preliminary exploration.