If you spend enough time on Crypto X (formerly Twitter) or Reddit or any other social media with a bias toward cryptocurrencies, as we tend to do, you will notice an interesting pattern regarding XRP and the company behind it.

While Ripple continues to expand with new licenses, partnerships, regulatory approvals, and even acquisitions, the majority of comments are focused on its native token’s price performance. So, do people actually care about Ripple, or is it all about XRP’s next big run?

Ripple Keeps Growing

Before we dive into our findings, let’s first apologize to any XRP Army participants who might not fall under this category. After all, its community is one of the biggest and loudest online, and we don’t want to rattle any cages.

Now, let’s talk about how big Ripple has become in recent years. The company, which was once sued by the SEC and whose execs considered shutting down, launched its own stablecoin less than two years ago, which has now become a $1.6 billion asset.

Ripple has also invested heavily in institutional infrastructure, such as the acquisition of Hidden Road (now called Ripple Prime), acquired other businesses, launched services for tokenized assets, rolled out AI-focused developer tools for the XRP Ledger, and continued pushing cross-border payments.

Unlike previous cycles, the company is no longer known only for payments, as it now operates across stablecoins, custody, tokenization, institutional finance, and even dev tooling. From a business and expansion perspective, 2025 and 2026 have been the firm’s busiest and arguably most successful years to date.

Yet, almost none of those announcements translated into immediate price moves for the underlying asset.

Retail Investors Still Obsessed by XRP Only

Despite all of those developments, XRP rocketed mostly after it became known that Gary Gensler would step down from his role at the SEC, which essentially marked the beginning of the end of the legal spat between the two. It peaked just over a year ago, and it has been mostly downhill since then. Even the ETF launches in November didn’t result in the promised price gains.

To many market participants, Ripple is simply the company behind the token. And, they don’t directly buy shares of that company; they accumulate XRP. If a banking partnership doesn’t increase the demand for the asset immediately, they don’t really care about it. If RLUSD’s expansion doesn’t benefit XRP somehow, they stand aside.

This partly explains why Ripple-related headlines often generate less excitement than XRP price movements, whale accumulations, or technical analysis. We have seen this firsthand.

As such, even though Ripple and XRP will forever remain connected, it still means that the former can generate revenue without affecting the latter, while the token can rally due to factors not related to the company behind it.

Search trends, social media engagement, and trading activity all point in the same direction: traders are consistently attracted to XRP far more than Ripple itself.

Source: CryptoPotato