The debate over whether Ripple’s stablecoin RLUSD is slowly cannibalizing XRP’s utility has been rippling through the cryptocurrency community for months. Firasan Al-Jarrah, founder of Black Swan Capitalist, has a completely different point of view, and he expresses it with conviction.
RLUSD and XRP are not competing. They are a two-part system.
In an interview with Quinpedia, the surgeon publicly addressed this question more than a hundred times by his count, and his answer hasn’t changed. RLUSD is a complementary liquidity layer, not a replacement for XRP. The two assets serve structurally different functions on the same ledger.
“RLUSD provides the soft dollars that institutions want,” Al-Jarrah told Coinpedia exclusively. “XRP remains the engine that moves value across systems efficiently. It expands the total addressable market rather than competing for the same segment.”
His argument is that RLUSD acts as a structured, stable ramp that gives institutions the comfort they need to put capital into the XRP Ledger in the first place. Once this capital is on the ledger and needs to move across currencies or jurisdictions, it requires neutral bridge assets for efficient routing.
This role belongs to XRP, Al-Jarrah says. Every RLUSD transaction that moves to another currency creates demand for XRP as an intermediary. Activity on the ledger also burns up XRP fees, creating a direct deflationary effect from the increased volume of stablecoins.
How does the liquidity model actually work?
The surgeon explained that the XRPL was designed with this tension in mind from the beginning. The ledger operates on a two-level liquidity model. Retail participants earn yield by providing liquidity in public AMM pools. However, establishments do not rely on the same retail parks. They gain deeper, more stable liquidity through direct ledger integration, over-the-counter arrangements, and private liquidity facilities.
As institutional size on the ledger grows, it increases overall fee generation and improves routing efficiency, making liquidity provision more attractive to retail participants over time, not less. The system separates high-frequency institutional paths from revenue-generating public pools while allowing both to coexist and benefit from overall network growth.
The first real use case is worth seeing
When asked which corridor or institution would first clarify XRP’s role in commodity settlement in a documented and verifiable manner, Al-Jarrah pointed to Japan and non-dollar energy trading.
“I look forward to the first on-chain verified settlement where a token or stablecoin representation of the value of energy or commodities using XRP is linked between two currencies or payment systems other than the US dollar,” he said. “It will likely start small and emerge through corporate or regulatory disclosures, rather than through big marketing announcements.”
His thinking focuses on the fragmentation of post-OPEC energy trade and the growing desire among Middle Eastern producers and Asian buyers to reduce reliance on traditional correspondent banks and dollar clearing. Once one corridor proves its worth, reliability and cost-effectiveness at scale, other corridors will quickly follow because infrastructure friction has already been removed and regulatory support from central banks and financial institutions is already in place.
The disconnect signal is already visible
The surgeon was asked about the first measurable sign of a separation of XRP from Bitcoin, given that he expected this separation to occur gradually and then suddenly. His answer was direct.
“The signal has been visible for some time if you look beyond the price,” he said. “Regulatory clarity, infrastructure development and institutional integration are being built specifically around the XRP Ledger, not around Bitcoin.”
When payment providers, banks and central banks experiment with or reference XRPL capabilities while treating Bitcoin primarily as a reserve asset, this is de facto segregation. He argues that the market intentionally misprices strategically important assets during the construction phase. This creates what he described as the classic dynamic where everyone sees it coming but most still position themselves too late.
“The gradual phase is quiet infrastructure work,” Al-Jarrah said. “The flash point arrives when real volume forces the market to reprice the asset based on actual usage rather than anecdotal correlation.”
Integration and disruption at the same time
On the question of whether Ripple is able to integrate XRP into existing financial infrastructure at the same time while the underlying ledger disrupts the same infrastructure, Al-Jarrah sees no contradiction.
“Ripple can integrate XRP into existing infrastructure while the underlying ledger continues to deliver efficiency gains that legacy players will eventually have to adopt or compete against,” he said. “This is not a contradiction. It is a multi-stage strategy.”
One layer works within existing systems to gain adoption and scale. Another layer uses technology’s ability to reduce friction and counterparty risk in ways that gradually change power dynamics. They both operate simultaneously on different time horizons.
