The XRP Roast: Brad, the Army and the $589 Dream

Parody and satire. The opinions and insults are comedy. The facts are real and sourced at the bottom. XRP was $1.39 when this was written (9 October 2026). Nothing here is financial advice, and if you take financial advice from a comedy blog, you're a fucking idiot.

Cover photo: Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, the face of a man whose XRP is someone else's problem.

[Walks on. Beer in hand. Doesn't put it down.]

Thank you. Thank you. Sit down, you can't afford to stand up for long anyway, I've seen your portfolios.

Welcome to the XRP Awards. Tonight's ceremony is sponsored by a coin that has been "about to explode" since 2017. Nine years. That's not a pump, that's a pregnancy that turned into a GCSE.

Don't worry, nothing I say tonight is financial advice. Financial advice would need some finance in it. This is just an old man reading court documents for fun. And I did read them, which already makes me the most diligent XRP investor in the room.

Meet Brad

Our first nominee is Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple. Look at him. Look at that smile. That's the smile of a man who has never once seen his XRP in the red, because by the time it was in the red, it wasn't his XRP anymore. It was yours.

Court documents from the SEC case show Brad made around $164 million selling XRP between 2017 and 2020. One sale alone netted him about $42 million. And a class-action lawsuit claimed that in 2017 he told everyone he was "very, very, very long" XRP while he was selling it. Three verys. That isn't an investment position, Brad, that's a stammer.

Now, people say to me, "You can't call the CEO of a $40-billion company an asshole." And I say, you're right. I'm English. He's an arsehole. Same hole, better spelling.

Here's my favourite bit. Earlier this year Brad called XRP "the North Star for Ripple." Lovely. The North Star. Very poetic. A long way off, very cold, and it hasn't moved in years. Spot on, actually.

Then in May, at Consensus 2026, he told an interviewer he's "never been an XRP maxi." It's "a multi-chain world," apparently.

That's the Pope coming out on Easter Sunday and saying, "Look, I've never really been a Jesus maxi. It's a multi-god world."

The same week, Ripple's former CTO David Schwartz, the man who helped build the thing, said he'd moved most of his assets away from crypto and told everyone, "I'm not the diamond hands guy." He's also said he started selling XRP at ten cents "because it seemed insane."

Ten cents. The architect thought it was insane at ten cents. You bought it at three dollars forty because a man in a hoodie said "trust the process." The process sold at ten cents, mate.

Brad at the Goldman Sachs Tech Conference in 2018, explaining to bankers why they need XRP. (They didn't.) Photo by Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0. Caption is ours.

The SEC Saga, or: How to Win by Losing $125 Million

In December 2020 the SEC sued Ripple, Brad and co-founder Chris Larsen. The XRP Army treated this like the Siege of Stalingrad. It went on for four and a half years.

In July 2023 Judge Analisa Torres ruled. When Ripple sold XRP to institutions, that was an unregistered securities offering. When it sold XRP to you, anonymously on exchanges, that wasn't, because, roughly, random people on exchanges couldn't reasonably expect profits from Ripple's efforts.

A federal judge looked at the XRP Army and said they had no reasonable expectation of profit. And having met them, I think she was being kind.

Then the new, friendlier SEC turned up, and Ripple and the SEC asked the judge together to cut the fine to $50 million. She said no. Neither side had come close to showing "exceptional circumstances." So in August 2025 they both dropped their appeals, and the $125,035,150 penalty stood.

The XRP Army called it a total victory. Their company paid a hundred and twenty-five million dollars, and they had a party. That's how XRP holders define winning. That's me going to the doctor, being told I've got gout, and celebrating because it isn't both legs.

The Customers: Big Banks, Small Banks, and Paid Friends

Ripple loves telling you that over 300 financial institutions use RippleNet. True. What they mention less is that RippleNet is basically a very fancy messaging system, and most of those banks never touch XRP.

Take Santander, the big name everyone brags about. Its One Pay FX product ran on xCurrent, Ripple's messaging layer, not XRP. At one point Santander's own support desk said it used XRP, and then they retracted it. Imagine your most famous girlfriend putting out a press release to clarify you're just friends.

So who actually uses the coin? Mostly remittance outfits and smaller players. SBI Remit in Japan, payment companies, fintechs with liquidity headaches. The big banks use the email and the small ones use the token. It's a nightclub where Beyoncé is on the guest list but only came in to use the cloakroom.

And the most famous XRP customer of all? MoneyGram. Ripple bought a stake in them, and then between 2019 and 2020 paid them more than $50 million in "market development fees" to use it.

Ripple paid a customer to be a customer. That's not adoption. That's an escort.

And even that didn't last. MoneyGram stopped using it in December 2020, right after the SEC suit, and the partnership officially ended in March 2021. Even the one you paid left you.

But don't feel sorry for Ripple, because Ripple's doing brilliantly. It has its own dollar stablecoin, RLUSD, which hit about $1.3 billion by the end of 2025. In December 2025 it got conditional approval from the OCC to set up its own national trust bank. In 2025 it spent roughly $4 billion buying and investing in other companies. And its big goal for 2026 is a $1 billion revenue run rate, excluding XRP.

Excluding XRP. Read that again. The company's proudest number is the one that leaves out your coin. That's like McDonald's boasting about record profits, not counting burgers.

Oh, and the escrow. Since 2017 Ripple has unlocked up to a billion XRP on the first of every month. It puts most of it back, and there's still about 32 billion sitting in escrow. A tap that drips a billion coins every month, and Brad saying "relax, we turn most of it back off." Most of it. Lovely.

The XRP Army

Now let's talk about the XRP Army. Fox Business's Charles Gasparino called them a "cult of bagholders," and they went absolutely mental. Which, to be fair, is what a cult would do.

I don't think they're a cult. I think they're an army. Except armies sometimes retreat. Armies have intelligence. Armies look at the map now and again.

I'll say this for them: they're the most loyal people I've ever seen. Post one mildly negative thing about XRP and within four seconds there are 600 replies from accounts called "XRP_Lambo_589_Patriot" with an eagle, a flag and a Bible verse. Brad says something vague at a conference, and they spend three weeks decoding it like it's the Dead Sea Scrolls. Even some of their own people have now accused Ripple of talking in riddles while insiders cashed out. Took you nine years, but welcome.

Loyal to a company whose CEO just told them he isn't loyal back. That's not an investment thesis. That's a country and western song.

The $589 Psyop

Now the big one. Five hundred and eighty-nine dollars. If you've been anywhere near XRP Twitter, you've seen it. "XRP to $589." Where did it come from? Ripple? A bank? A central bank?

No. It came from a YouTuber called The Bearable Bull, in 2017 (The unbearable Bullshitter). He built a scenario where XRP took over a big share of global cross-border payments and worked backwards to a price. No Ripple executive, no analyst, no bank and no regulator has ever endorsed it. It's a hypothetical someone made on YouTube while you were still on Bitconnect.

And then it got better. A picture went viral of Bart Simpson writing "XRP TO HIT $589+ BY EOY" on the chalkboard, supposedly from the 2020 episode "Frinkcoin." It's doctored. Someone photoshopped it. The Simpsons have predicted a lot of things. This wasn't one of them.

That's your due diligence. A cartoon child. Edited.

Let's just do the maths, shall we? There's about 63 billion XRP in circulation.

63 billion XRP × $589 ≈ $37 trillion. The whole thing is worth about $87 billion today. That's a 425× gain.

Thirty-seven trillion dollars, for a coin the CEO isn't a maxi of, that the big banks don't use, that the company's revenue target leaves out, and that its own former CTO started selling at ten cents. And that's only counting what's circulating. Count all 100 billion and it's nearer sixty trillion.

It's not a price target. It's a lottery ticket with a flag in its profile picture.

The Prophets: Coach JV and the $1,000 Club

Which brings me to the influencers. And there's no finer example than Coach JV.

"Warriors!! XRP!"
Coach JV. Image: @Coachjv_ profile photo on X, shown for commentary. Caption is ours.

Here he is on X:

"Bitcoin will be the digital monetary base. XRP will be the global settlement rail. Two completely different purposes, one new financial system. Not competition. Infrastructure. Not hype. Inevitable." — Coach JV (@Coachjv_)

"Not hype. Inevitable." That's like a man saying "I'm not drunk" while hugging a lamppost.

Coach. Coach of what? "Coach" is what you put in your bio when "bloke with a ring light" won't fit. Coach JV's big pitch is that you should stop buying little luxuries and buy XRP every day instead, and by 2030 you'll be "ahead of 99% of people." He calls it "the greatest transfer of wealth" in history. He's said XRP will be number one, above Bitcoin, by 2030, and that XRP is his biggest holding.

The greatest transfer of wealth in history. And do you know what? He's right. There has been an enormous transfer of wealth. Brad's $164 million had to come from somewhere.

And here's the thing. Everyone "knows" Coach JV says a thousand dollars a coin. He doesn't. I checked. He's far too clever to give you a number. He says "number one by 2030," which is influencer for "I'll call you."

The actual $1,000 bloke is Dom Kwok, co-founder of EasyA and a former Goldman Sachs analyst, who forecast $1,000 XRP by 2030. When it didn't turn up on time, the line became "it'll still happen, the timeline's just different." The timeline's different! That's what my builder says.

63 billion XRP × $1,000 ≈ $63 trillion, about 720× today's value.

Sixty-three trillion dollars. For that, every person on Earth would need to hold around $7,800 of XRP. Eight billion people. Most of them don't have a bank account, and the ones who do have a bank that doesn't use XRP.

Good Night

Do I own XRP? No. I'm not brave enough. I'm not loyal enough. And frankly I don't have enough eagles in my profile picture.

But I do admire it. A coin that's been "about to explode" for nine years. A CEO who sold, a CTO who sold, a fine they called a win, a customer who was paid to show up and still left, and an army of the most hopeful people on the internet, still refreshing the chart at three in the morning.

Here's my one piece of advice, and it's free, which is exactly what it's worth: if a man in a hoodie on YouTube really knew which coin was going to $589, he wouldn't be telling you. He'd be on a yacht.

Probably Brad's.

Good night. Hug your family. Don't remortgage the house.

[Leaves. Takes the beer.]

Sources

The facts, as of 9 October 2026. The jokes are ours.

1. XRP price, market cap and supply: CoinGecko, 9 Oct 2026 ($1.39; about $87B market cap; about 63.1B circulating; about 100B total; all-time high $3.65 on 17 Jul 2025).
2. Garlinghouse XRP sales (about $164M, 2017–2020): Bitcoinist, on SEC case documents. "Very, very, very long" class-action allegation: CoinDesk.
3. "Never been an XRP maxi" (Consensus 2026) and Schwartz's "not the diamond hands guy": Yahoo Finance, May 2026.
4. "XRP is the North Star for Ripple": The Block. $1B revenue run rate excluding XRP: Yahoo Finance. About $4B invested in 2025: DL News.
5. SEC case, $125,035,150 penalty, appeals dismissed Aug 2025: SEC litigation release; Bloomberg Law.
6. Santander One Pay FX on xCurrent, not XRP: CNBC. MoneyGram market development fees: The Block, Crowdfund Insider. Partnership end: Decrypt.
7. OCC conditional approval for Ripple National Trust Bank: Ripple press release. RLUSD about $1.33B at end-2025: Stablecoin Insider.
8. Monthly escrow unlocks, about 32B XRP escrowed: KuCoin News.
9. Gasparino's "cult of bagholders": altFINS summary.
10. $589 origin (The Bearable Bull, 2017) and the doctored Simpsons chalkboard: Capital.com; Gate.
11. Coach JV's claims: XRP #1 by 2030; ahead of 99% of people; "the greatest wealth transfer in history" (all The Crypto Basic).
12. Dom Kwok's $1,000-by-2030 forecast: Finance Magnates; "timeline is different": altFINS summary.
13. Cover photo: Brad Garlinghouse at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, by TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Captions are ours.

This is parody, satire and commentary on matters of public record, written for laughs. It is not investment advice, not a price prediction, and not a suggestion to buy, sell, or sue anyone. Got a coin that deserves a loving roast? Hit "Share your experience" and pick the 🤡 Crypto Comedy category. Swearing optional, receipts mandatory.