Investment Firm CEO Drops Utility Bomb On XRP, Is Community Hype A Detriment?

[Ben Graham]

Comments from Galaxy Digital’s leadership have looked into what ultimately sustains value in the crypto market. In a recent YouTube discussion centered on 2026 expectations for Bitcoin, crypto, and artificial intelligence, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz and Head of Research Alex Thorn singled out XRP and Cardano, questioning whether even the strongest communities can survive if real usage fails to expand when users have a vast number of alternatives to choose from.

Galaxy Digital Leadership Raises Questions About Community Versus Utility

During the YouTube discussion, Mike Novogratz presented the utility debate through the lens of capital allocation. He explained that the real question is what an investor chooses when presented with many viable options. If capital can flow into something like SpaceX, then crypto assets must compete on similar grounds.

He acknowledged that XRP and Cardano both have deeply committed communities, but questioned whether that loyalty can be sustained if users do not see any real utility with those ecosystems. “Can Ripple hold it together? Can Cardano hold it together?” Novogratz said.

In drawing comparisons, Novogratz referenced Charles Hoskinson, noting his success in maintaining Cardano’s community over time despite it being a “blockchain that people don’t really use a lot.” He made similar observations about XRP’s following, which has a strong community. However, he posed a direct question about sustainability: “Can you keep it together when there are more and more options?”

Recent crypto market dynamics have caused capital flows to become more selective. Developers and teams behind blockchain ecosystems all know this, and this is why there has been a race to demonstrate usage, revenue models, or clear value flows tied directly to their tokens. According to Novogratz, that doesn’t happen overnight. It’s probably a year-long process, not a one to three-month process.

Cardano And XRP Proving Real-World Relevance

The questions raised during the Galaxy Digital discussion arrive at a time when both Cardano and XRP are actively trying to strengthen their utility narratives. Recent events have seen Cardano attempting to reinforce its practical relevance through initiatives like the Midnight sidechain. Midnight is a privacy-focused Cardano sidechain network designed to support confidential smart contracts and selective data disclosure. 

Midnight is intended as a way to attract enterprise and institutional use cases that require compliance-friendly privacy, an area where public blockchains have traditionally struggled.

XRP, on the other hand, is taking a different path through Ripple’s hard work to increase the utility of the XRP Ledger. Ripple has been expanding utility around Ripple USD (RLUSD), its US dollar-backed stablecoin, including broader deployment across multiple Layer-2 networks. 

Ripple has also been on a partnership spree this year in moves to strengthen the utility of the XRP ecosystem, with about $4 billion spent on major acquisitions in 2025. The company also recently partnered with Doppler Finance to explore collaboration in XRP-based yield infrastructure and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization on the XRP Ledger, which is another added utility.