For years, crypto has been treated as a market to speculate on rather than a system to build with. That mindset is starting to fracture. In a recent long-form discussion, Asheesh Birla outlined a view of crypto’s next phase that has little to do with hype cycles or retail trading and far more to do with how money actually moves behind the scenes.
Key Takeaways
Crypto is shifting from speculative markets toward financial infrastructure
XRP is increasingly framed as a settlement and liquidity tool for institutions
Programmable corporate treasuries may drive the next wave of enterprise adoption
His argument is simple: crypto is maturing into infrastructure. The speculative era, shaped by memes, leverage, and fast money, is slowly giving way to a period where regulation, institutional tooling, and serious capital define what succeeds and what fades away.
Why regulation and plumbing matter more than narratives
Birla described today’s environment as fundamentally different from crypto’s early years. Clearer legal frameworks are reducing uncertainty, enterprise-grade systems are replacing experimental tooling, and large pools of capital are entering with long-term expectations rather than short-term trades.
Together, these forces are pushing crypto toward the same standards applied to traditional financial systems. Reliability, predictability, and compliance are now the entry requirements. Assets that cannot meet those standards, he suggested, will struggle to remain relevant outside speculative markets.
XRP’s role in an institutional-first world
Within that framework, XRP stands out not because of market performance, but because of how it was designed. Birla emphasized that XRP did not emerge from retail experimentation. Instead, it was engineered specifically for institutional use cases such as cross-border settlement, liquidity provisioning, and market infrastructure.
The XRP Ledger integrates features that large financial entities care about: rapid settlement, deterministic finality, and negligible transaction costs. These characteristics are not about convenience for traders – they are about reducing operational risk and friction for banks and corporations moving capital at scale.
Another major shift is regulatory clarity in the United States. With much of the legal uncertainty now resolved, XRP no longer sits in the same gray zone that once deterred enterprise adoption. For institutions bound by compliance obligations, this change is decisive.
A treasury strategy built on usage, not price bets
Birla also contrasted Evernorth’s approach with more visible corporate crypto strategies. Rather than accumulating assets and waiting for appreciation, the firm focuses on deploying capital in ways that mirror traditional treasury management.
That means backing applications built on the XRP ecosystem, engaging with decentralized finance only where risk controls and regulatory alignment are in place, and aiming to generate returns through activity rather than passive exposure. The objective is participation in an economic network, not a directional bet on price.
This model reflects a broader institutional preference: assets are valuable insofar as they are useful.
Programmable finance enters the enterprise
One of the more transformative ideas discussed was the rise of programmable treasuries. Birla described how blockchain-based systems can automate processes that remain manual in most corporations today.
Currency conversions, payroll distribution, liquidity balancing, and internal transfers can all be handled by code rather than intermediaries. For multinational firms, these efficiencies translate into faster execution, lower costs, and fewer operational bottlenecks.
In that context, blockchain is not competing with existing finance – it is rewiring it.
A quieter, more durable crypto cycle
Birla’s perspective points to a less visible but potentially more enduring phase of crypto adoption. Instead of retail enthusiasm driving prices, institutional integration may define which networks become embedded in global finance.
If that vision plays out, the winners will not be the loudest tokens or the fastest rallies, but the systems that quietly become indispensable. XRP, in this view, is not being repositioned as a trade – it is being absorbed as part of the financial stack.
