Charles Hoskinson has issued a sharp criticism of Ripple and XRP’s token structure, arguing that nothing in the Ripple network creates organic buy demand for XRP. In his view, XRP holders are helping finance a private company, while that company has no obligation to return value to the token holders who support the ecosystem.
A token model that, in his view, does not feed value back
Hoskinson framed the issue as a structural divide between tokens that build circular economies and tokens that mainly function as fundraising tools for the companies behind them. He placed XRP in the second group. According to his remarks, Ripple is a private company with its own investors and shareholders, and when it generates revenue, it does not use those profits to buy XRP back from the market. Instead, he said, Ripple sells XRP, converts the proceeds into cash, and uses that cash to build out company assets and operations.
He pointed specifically to assets such as a prime broker, a custody platform, and treasury management tools, saying the value of those businesses sits on Ripple’s balance sheet rather than with XRP holders. Hoskinson stated, “When they do make revenue and profit, there are no buybacks. The Ripple company is not going and buying back XRP. They sell the XRP.”
Why he compared XRP with Hyperliquid
To explain the distinction, Hoskinson used Hyperliquid as an example. He said user activity inside the Hyperliquid ecosystem generates fees, and those fees are used to buy back the underlying token. That creates a direct link between network usage and token demand. As the network grows, value is pushed toward holders through a defined mechanism.
His argument was that XRP does not work that way. The dispute is not simply about whether Ripple has a business model. It is about whether that business model creates a measurable path for value to return to the token itself. That point touches a broader debate in crypto: token utility, value accrual, and whether token holders should benefit from growth through buybacks or similar mechanisms.
Regulation as a fight over market structure
Hoskinson also expanded the criticism into regulation. He argued that Ripple is pushing for a framework in which new crypto projects are treated as securities by default, while established assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Cardano are effectively grandfathered in as commodities under current rules.
He said that structure would leave new projects struggling to get listed, gain liquidity, and distribute ownership widely enough to ever mature into blockchain commodities. In his words, the result is that incumbents gain something like a monopoly or oligopoly, while newer entrants are locked out. He described that outcome bluntly: “The new projects never get anything. That feels like Wall Street.”
Those comments push the discussion beyond XRP alone. They put two issues at the center: whether XRP has a built-in source of buy demand, and whether the regulatory framework being promoted by major players would preserve advantages for large existing tokens while making market entry harder for newer projects.