XRPL has only 17 active developers as of January 2025.
In contrast, during 2024, 7,625 developers worked on Solana.
According to data from DeFiLlama, an on-chain metrics platform, the total value locked (TVL) on the Ledger XRP increased to $87 million. In September 2024, just a few months ago, this locked value barely reached $15 million.
The above comparison suggests that users they are opting for XRPL as a growing alternative to interact with decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and financial services. The value locked in a cryptocurrency network represents the total amount of cryptoassets that are committed in different decentralized finance (DeFi) applications or protocols.
That said, other behavior in XRPL indicates that interest in this network remains relatively stable, but that this is not enough to compare this ecosystem with the rest of the large cryptocurrency networks.
According to the same metrics platform, XRP has 17 active developers as of January 2024, and has had at least 14 developers working on it since July 2022. At its highest point, this network had 32 developers working simultaneously, in February 2023.
The low number of developers working on XRPL is in line with what is empirically perceived in the XRP network: an empty network, in a state of construction that, although it has more volume and value locked than in previous months, It still fails to offer a variety of utilities and services comparable to those of other ecosystems.. This low number of developers also raises centralization concerns on the network.
XRP is a network that has not finished booting
At the time of writing, the official XRPL website It lists 7 infrastructure applications, 4 development, 1 interoperability, 4 wallets, 7 NFTs, 5 exchanges, 4 cryptocurrency games and 1 security. In total, there are 32 applications available on the XRP network, again, according to its website.
This is a low number considering that the XRPL network was designed in 2011 and launched publicly in 2012. Almost 15 years have passed since the XRP network is functional and on rails.
In contrast, The Solana network, which was launched on the market in 2020, has more than 400 decentralized applicationsaccording to the information that provided by Dappradar. According to a report, 7,625 developers They worked in the Solana ecosystem during 2024. 6,456 was the number of developers that Ethereum attracted in the same year.
There are two XRPs in the soul of investors
Meanwhile, XRP, the cryptocurrency, is a regular character on the lists of crypto assets whose prices are rising the most. As reported by CriptoNoticias, the crypto asset recently marked an all-time price high, surpassing the USD 3.31 mark. At the time of writing, XRP is the third most valued cryptocurrency in the world in terms of market capitalization, exceeding USD 170 billion.
This data suggests that XRP It is considered by investors and participants to be an asset suitable for financial speculation.. Meanwhile, it is less considered for its empirical use for payments and digital utilities, which were the principles that animated its creation. In other words, the usefulness of XRP as a digital asset and its valuation as a financial asset are dissociated properties in the mentality of investors and traders who value XRP.
User participation in XRPL, then, pales in comparison to activity in other large, medium and even small cryptocurrency networks.
A second layer like Arbitrum, for example, which was deployed in 2021, reaches USD 3 billion in locked value. This means that Arbitrum hosts 38 times the amount of TVL on its network than XRP Ledger. A network like StacksBitcoin’s second layer considered small, has USD 124 million of locked value.