Bitwise CIO Says XRP Track Record Could Reassure Advisers on Durability

Hougan Makes the Durability Case

If Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan has sized up his firm's audience correctly, the advisers who once parked XRP in the unproven column are the same ones now prepared to treat it as established infrastructure. Hougan made that case in a video posted to X by Token Relations on September 28, arguing that the XRP price debate misses the two questions advisers actually ask. The first is survival. In his telling, advisers weighing crypto wonder whether the assets are real and whether they will still exist years from now, and XRP carries what he called an exceptionally long track record that convinces people it will endure. He placed the token among the “Mount Rushmore assets” of crypto, his shorthand for the sector's most established names. The second explanation runs through familiar work. Hougan said XRP fits real-world applications advisers already understand, pointing to cross-currency transfers, liquidity, the trading availability that market makers help supply, and stablecoins, tokens built to hold a reference value. Confidence that an asset endures, he cautioned, is not the same as an expectation that its price rises. The ledger gives that durability argument a running record of its own: the XRP Ledger, the blockchain whose native token is XRP, kept expanding through 2026, with stablecoin supply and tokenization growing even as the token's market value weakened, and network usage and trading volume can drift away from price. The ledger's work continues on other fronts too, with a validators batch upgrade queued for October 9. Ripple's banking bid adds one more anchor. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted conditional approval to Ripple National Trust Bank on December 12, 2025, a preliminary decision requiring the proposed institution to satisfy pre-opening conditions and secure final authorization before it can operate. Read together, the applications Hougan names sit squarely inside traditional finance, which is the point: none of them asks an adviser to learn a new market.

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A video posted to X by Token Relations on September 28.

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ETF Assets Slide From a Record

Those arguments now meet a flow picture that has stopped expanding. Figures compiled alongside the video show XRP exchange-traded funds, products that give investors exposure through exchange-listed shares, grew net assets 80% in the third quarter to a record $1.77 billion, with cumulative net inflows into United States spot products reaching $1.791 billion by October 2. The record did not hold. Total net assets peaked at $1.77 billion on September 25, slipped to roughly $1.69 billion after September 28, and stood at $1.658 billion on October 2, the day the funds recorded a $3.28 million net outflow that came entirely from Bitwise. Flows and valuations can part ways as the underlying market price moves, and the October 2 print shows that split in a single number. Bitwise, Hougan's own firm, operates directly in this market. Its Bitwise XRP ETF trades on the NYSE Arca exchange with an annual fee of 0.34%, or $34 for every $10,000 invested, and as of October 1 the issuer recorded about 412.93 million XRP in the trust with net assets of $606.47 million. For advisers the wrapper matters as much as the argument, because an exchange-listed product behaves like a stock inside a brokerage account: no wallet, no direct custody, and a purchase that settles in the same session as an equity allocation. An adviser who can already buy a listed fund needs no new operational process, which is why the share class, not the settlement chain, is doing the recruiting. That convenience is the audience Hougan's durability case is pitched at, a client who wants exposure without new infrastructure. Readers tracking the asset can follow our XRP coverage as the flow data updates through October.

What Holds Either Way

COINOTAG analysis: the part of this story that survives regardless of where XRP trades next is documentary, not rhetorical. The OCC's own news release, the primary filing behind the banking angle, states that approval for Ripple National Trust Bank is conditional and preliminary, with pre-opening conditions and final authorization still outstanding, a record that stands whether advisers adopt Hougan's thesis or pass on it. What it does not settle is direction. The working facts for anyone sizing a position are the $1.658 billion asset level, the October 2 outflow and the unfinished charter; for chart context, see our XRP technical analysis, and for access, our guide to where and how to buy XRP.