Seems many of us are cursed with ripplers... I have a brother-in-law who was bugging me about it, so here's what I sent him:

tl;dr legal good news may cause a big price jump, but ripple is no world settlement layer.

In 2017, the BOE did a proof of concept with Ripple to explore digital pound designs. It looks like their relationship concluded in 2017.

Some Ripple promoters have been claiming that the BOE has plans to use Ripple in 2024, but these claims seem primarily to be based on a mention of the 2017 Ripple Proof of Concept in the BOE's Roadmap for Real-time Gross Settlement Services Beyond 2024. If you use your browser to search the document for "Ripple" you can see that the mention doesn't really imply a future connection.

Since 2020, the SEC has been going after Ripple for selling an unregistered security. In 2023, courts ruled that Ripple's "programmatic" (read on exchanges or through algorithms rather than directly to investors) sales of tokens did not constitute unregistered securities. XRP token price jumped 70% on the news last summer, but the case is ongoing.

This year, a judge mostly dismissed a class action lawsuit against Ripple, but implied that XRP sales (even on exchanges and via DEXs) might indeed constitute sales of unregistered securities.

In April of 2024, a federal judge dismissed the SEC's claims that Binance's token (BNB) was a security. This has given some new wind to Ripple's defense against the SEC, although the SEC denies the BNB ruling is relevant.

A blockchain is an incredibly inefficient ledger. The original innovation of a blockchain is the ability to achieve consensus (settlement) without a coordinating third party. This innovation comes at a cost. Blockchains that are actually decentralized (and therefore truly resistant to regulation) are slow.

Ripple uses a blockchain and claims to achieve transaction settlement in 3-5 seconds. The way they achieve this is by having very few nodes (100 or so). Compare this to the ~70k nodes on the Bitcoin Network or the validators on the Ethereum Network. It's not the case that raw # of nodes being higher is always better, but everything I've learned about blockchain tech suggests that 100 nodes is centralized and that such projects would be far better just using a database like any other money services business.

Ripple is a regulatory arbitrage play. It is just as centralized as something like Bank of America or PayPal but because they use a blockchain they avoid many financial regulations. It's unclear when/if this will change, but my bet is that in five years Ripple will be forgotten either because regulations come down on them or because someone realizes that a blockchain with 1 node is a lot faster than a blockchain with 100 nodes.

At the end of the day, I don't see anything that distinguishes Ripple from competitors like Solana, Avalanche, Cardano, or Tron. Good news in the courts may lead to another jump in price like we saw last year, but it's tough to know when to sell. Long term, I don't see it being big.

Hope this is helpful.