XRPL’s 2026 Make-or-Break Year: Top 3 or Bust

Panos Mekras, founder of Anodos Finance, has issued a stark warning about the XRP Ledger’s (XRPL) current trajectory. He points to what he describes as alarming network metrics: “only a few thousand active users,” daily decentralized exchange (DEX) volume “frequently under $10m,” and Automated Market Maker (AMM) total value locked (TVL) “struggling below $50m” roughly two years after its launch. For Mekras, these figures are symptomatic of a deeper infrastructure problem. He characterizes XRPL as “an isolated island,” hampered by limited bridges to other blockchain ecosystems and “fragmented, high-fee gateways” that fail to provide the seamless on-ramps and off-ramps necessary for mass adoption.

The proposed remedy is direct and ambitious. Mekras argues that XRPL-based applications must achieve native integration with mainstream payment rails like Visa and Mastercard, allowing users to issue cards and spend XRPL assets in real-time. Furthermore, he frames the recent launch of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin as a competitive constraint. While he views RLUSD reaching a $1 billion market cap in its first year as “positive,” he contends “$1B is not good enough” when competing against incumbents with circulations ranging from $5 billion to $180 billion, which have already become default entry points for users.

Mekras traces part of XRPL’s current challenges to a strategic pivot made a decade ago. He argues that Ripple’s 2014 shift toward business-to-business (B2B) payments and institutional partnerships trained the market to associate XRP primarily with Ripple, rather than with the capabilities of the underlying XRPL itself. This, in his telling, left many XRP holders unaware of the ledger’s native DEX and tokenization features. He referenced a 2023 reply from Ripple CTO David “JoelKatz” Schwartz, who defended the health of the DEX ecosystem at the time of the pivot, citing “over $8 million per day in swaps and payments” that Ripple “could 100% confirm” as real activity.

For 2026, Mekras wants a fundamental repositioning. The goal should be to move XRPL beyond the “payments” label and instead establish it as a protocol-layer finance stack where core features like an aggregated liquidity pool are built-in, rather than stitched together through complex smart contracts. A central pillar of this vision is “XRPFi,” an initiative to mobilize what he describes as “the $100B+ of dormant XRP into productive, yield-generating capital.” He highlights projects like Flare’s FXRP via FAssets as a route to bring XRP into smart contract environments without central custodians, and Axelar & Midas’s mXRP as an “institutional-grade liquid staking token” that could enable “5–10% APY,” creating liquid XRP variants for use as collateral and AMM liquidity.

The consumer strategy, according to Mekras, must be built on “invisible infrastructure.” He envisions utility applications where users never encounter traditional crypto mechanics. “If a user is ever prompted to ‘Add a Trust Line’ or ‘Have enough XRP for the reserves’ we have already failed,” he wrote. “The interface must be indistinguishable from the modern mobile apps people already trust.” To enable this, he identifies specific technical priorities, chiefly Sponsored Fees and Reserves (proposal XLS-68), which would allow developers to sponsor account costs for users, paired with Batch Transactions to compress multi-step actions into a single signature.

Mekras reserves his sharpest criticism for the ecosystem’s funding mechanisms. He labels Ripple’s 2022 commitment of 1 billion XRP to fund XRPL development a “Ghost Fund,” estimating that less than $50 million—under 5% of the pledged value—has reached active builders in four years. “A grant program that takes 3 months to approve $50,000 and can take another 3 months to receive the money is not a growth engine, it is a bureaucracy,” he argued. His prescription is a “war chest mentality”: issuing million-dollar checks to proven teams, creating direct liquidity incentives, and building a unified developer experience.

His conclusion is a direct ultimatum for 2026. The XRPL ecosystem must aggressively fund distribution and liquidity, eliminate onboarding friction, and build consumer products where the ledger operates purely as a backend. Without this drastic shift, Mekras warns, XRPL risks remaining a technically capable network that nonetheless fails to attract sustained users, developers, or capital at the scale needed to compete. The narrow shot at joining the top three networks by volume and liquidity is, in his view, a now-or-never proposition.