Do 300 Banks Use XRP? What Ripple's Own Numbers Actually Say

You’ve seen “300 banks use XRP” a thousand times. The number is real. It just doesn’t count what most people think it counts.

Here’s what Ripple’s own press releases and executives actually said, and how to read the next partnership headline.

RippleNet vs. XRP: two different decisions

RippleNet is like a phone network that Ripple signs banks and payment firms up to, so they can move money across borders. Joining it doesn’t mean using XRP. That’s a separate choice each firm makes.

Back then, Ripple sold two products:

• xCurrent moved ordinary money. Banks still kept piles of cash waiting in every country they paid into.
• xRapid (later renamed On-Demand Liquidity) replaced that pile with XRP, bought and sold in seconds along the way. Like buying pesos the moment you need them instead of keeping a drawer full of them in Mexico.

The numbers, from Ripple itself

Date	What Ripple said	XRP users
June 2018	CEO Brad Garlinghouse: more than 100 xCurrent customers	“Six or seven” on xRapid
Oct 1, 2018	xRapid goes live commercially	3 firms
Jan 8, 2019	200+ firms signed up to RippleNet, 13 new names	5 of the 13 to use XRP
Nov 2019 (Swell)	Garlinghouse: more than 300 customers	“More than two dozen” using XRP via On-Demand Liquidity
Nov 2022 (Swell)	$30 billion processed on RippleNet	Figure covers “both fiat and crypto”

The half of Garlinghouse’s 2019 post that nobody shares is the second half: more than two dozen of those 300 used XRP.

How “300 customers” became “300 banks using XRP”

Six weeks after that post, news coverage put “300 customers globally” in the same breath as MoneyGram, Santander and American Express. But Santander’s app ran on xCurrent, not XRP, while MoneyGram did use XRP. Give that sentence a few years of reposts and you get “300 banks use XRP.”

Coverage often welds company and coin together. A 2020 CNBC segment introduced “Ripple, which of course you might know XRP,” then noted that many of Ripple’s customers are banks, as if the two were the same thing.

What the banks said

In January 2018, Bloomberg asked executives at seven of the world’s largest banks. None wanted to use XRP. The one company found using it, a US-Mexico remittance firm, had done 10 to 15 transactions since October.

That stings. But it predates xRapid’s commercial launch, and payment firms, not big banks, adopted XRP first, one corridor at a time.

The Bitso deal: XRP Ledger, not necessarily XRP

In February, Ripple released a film about Bitso, the large Mexican exchange, with XRP in the title. On June 11, the two expanded their deal: Bitso’s peso stablecoin (MXNB) would be issued on the XRP Ledger alongside Ripple’s dollar stablecoin.

Search the release yourself and you’ll find “XRP Ledger” throughout, but not XRP on its own. Every ledger payment burns a sliver of XRP as a fee, but the coins moving in this deal are a dollar coin and a peso coin.

And the status? On August 27, Bitso made its peso coin available on Base. On September 1, asked about the XRP Ledger, Bitso’s account said MXNB runs on Arbitrum and Base, with no date for the XRPL yet. The June headline is genuine; the launch on the ledger is still waiting on a date.

How to read the next partnership headline

• A RippleNet headline tells you who signed up to Ripple’s network.
• An XRP headline tells you the coin itself is moving through the deal.

Open the release and search the page for “XRP.” That one check separates the two.

There is real XRP usage. Ripple’s Monica Long said in 2019 that demand for On-Demand Liquidity came largely from existing RippleNet customers, so the 300 fed the smaller list over time. Early users included firms paying wages to workers in the Philippines around the clock, including over bank-holiday weekends. That’s what an XRP headline looks like: the coin named, and doing the work the drawer full of pesos used to do.

Why waiting for “the banks” isn’t a plan

Plenty of holders bought on MoneyGram, Ripple’s best-known XRP customer, right up until February 22, 2021, when MoneyGram said it had suspended trading on Ripple’s platform because of the SEC lawsuit. If your plan is “wait for the news,” someone else’s calendar decides when you move.

That leaves three decisions to make before the next headline:

1. Where are your coins, and who holds the keys?
2. Are they doing anything while the XRP list grows, or just sitting there?
3. When the next partnership headline lands, will you buy, sell or let it pass? Decide now, so you’re not deciding on the day off emotion.