Meanwhile, the other community member believes the patience of XRP investors is “genuinely a psychological phenomenon.”

Ripple and its native non-stablecoin have a substantial community, but also a fair share of critics due to some of the core implementations. Its growth in popularity over the past several years has been quite astonishing, which sometimes even surpasses its market rise.

As such, whenever someone, especially a high-profile figure within the crypto industry, speaks against XRP in some form, there’s usually backlash.

A Bank Wearing a Hoodie?

Davinci Jeremie is among the OG crypto influencers and analysts, famously advising people to buy BTC when it was worth $1. In a recent post on X, he criticized XRP for several of its key features that could actually be making it a “bank wearing a hoodie.”

He outlined that these factors could be hidden leverage, fake decentralization, pausable exits, insider advantages, and users locked in wrapped IOUs. Instead, he commented that bitcoin does not have any of these.

Your favorite crypto project is just a bank wearing a hoodie.

*cough* $XRP

Hidden leverage ✓
Fake decentralization ✓
Pausable exits ✓
Insider advantages ✓
Users locked in wrapped IOUs ✓#Bitcoin has none of these.

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Name one other project that doesn’t. I’ll wait. 👇

— Davinci Jeremie (@Davincij15) March 11, 2026

Somewhat expectedly, most comments below the posts lashed out at Jeremie, with one saying, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever read from you. XRP is everything that they wanted Bitcoin to be. That’s a fact.” Naturally, Jeremie disagreed. Others, though, agreed with his initial comments, saying that “XRP is a s**t and not a match” to bitcoin.

Finally, XRP’s Moment?

In contrast to the aforementioned statement, XRP Bags, among the vocal members of the XRP community on X, outlined what it feels like to be a holder of the cross-border token. They believe every year so far has begun with big promises but seemingly have failed to deliver, or at least until 2023, when it was the first big break in the lawsuit against the SEC.

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More promisingly, though, the user noted that 2025 was an “I told you so” year for XRP, while 2026 shows that they are “just getting started.”

the XRP holder experience:

2017 — “this is going to change banking forever”
2018 — “just wait”
2019 — “keep stacking”
2020 — “SEC who?”
2021 — “SEC lawsuit, this is actually bullish”
2022 — “just wait”
2023 — “WE WON (partially)”
2024 — “Keep accumulating”
2025 — “told you”
2026…

— XRP Bags💰👨🏽‍🚀 BagMan (@XRPBags) March 13, 2026

Opinion by: Ana Carolina Oliveira, chief compliance officer at Venga

Crypto doesn’t have a money laundering problem on its own. At least, not when compared to traditional finance, where the practice is at least twice as prevalent and over 90% of which is believed to go undetected. Money laundering is a general problem wherever we see the transfer of funds. That’s the good news. 

Blockchain records everything for posterity. When money laundering does occur, an indelible record is created that allows the illicit financial flows to be traced from end to end.

Just because crypto doesn’t have a particular money laundering problem doesn’t mean that money laundering has been eradicated. The anti-money laundering system needs to evolve as a whole to strengthen preventive and investigative measures across traditional finance as well as centralized and decentralized finance (CeFi and DeFi) environments.

This evolution requires greater communication within the sector, improved feedback mechanisms, a deeper understanding of emerging typologies and more effective dissemination of new trends. 

The recently published European Union AML Regulation (Regulation EU 2024/1624) sets some rules on this matter, but more needs to be done in practice. Achieving this calls for regulators and industry leaders to create the kind of guardrails that go beyond “box-checking” compliance. 

Crypto must do better

It’s not enough to have AML procedures in place. These need to be constantly enhanced to ensure that crypto overcomes its misunderstood reputation as a high-risk money-laundering environment and strengthens its barriers to keep aggressively combating this practice.

This demands a cultural change in how we approach money laundering, with an emphasis on greater information sharing. Otherwise, criminals will simply shift operations from high AML venues to softer crypto targets where they can continue to ply their trade.

Crypto “enables” money laundering in exactly the same manner as fiat. The architecture may be different, but the outcome is the same: bad actors doing bad things with funds that facilitate everything from ransomware to, in the most egregious cases, terrorism. 

Blockchain’s pseudonymity may be a feature, not a bug, but it makes it hard to know who you’re dealing with when it comes to self-hosted wallets, exacerbated when mixers are used to obfuscate the source of funds.

When you can’t easily identify the origin or owner of the funds, you will struggle to prevent money laundering. 

Related: Universal blockchains buckle under real-world demands

That is the reality for fiat and crypto alike. A single exchange, no matter how robust its AML and Know Your Transaction tooling, lacks the visibility into everything that’s taking place onchain. Collectively, however, all crypto platforms possess vast knowledge of who’s doing what onchain, and when that “what” strays into the realm of suspected criminality, that information must be shared.

At present, initiatives like the Travel Rule, wallet screening and onchain analytics form a powerful AML barrier, but responsibility and the costs associated with creating the pathways to combat illicit activity, are delegated to individual entities. To give just one example, the Travel Rule mandates a SWIFT/IBAN-style identification system, but the industry has been left alone to create the technology and integration to facilitate this exchange of information.

In other words, regulators have delegated the implementation of a “crypto SWIFT system” to the industry. In a sector characterized by multi-jurisdictional companies that are subject to different geo-specific regulations, this compliance burden is colossal and labyrinthine. The ideal solution is for a global compliance standard to be implemented industry-wide.

Given the difficulties of getting different regulators and regions to agree to such a framework, the onus falls to the crypto industry, once more, to self-regulate. States and other national competent authorities must do better in regulating and setting the path for the industry to comply. 

Fewer loopholes, more freedom

The biggest crypto money-laundering challenge at present is the difficulty of identifying who owns the wallets, and not the technology itself. Because the United States, EU and Asia have different thresholds and rules when it comes to sharing information, performing due diligence and enforcing the Travel Rule, there are loopholes that bad actors exploit.

Closing off these loopholes won’t just curtail money laundering; it will also empower legitimate users to enjoy the financial freedom that crypto provides. The freedom to transact, to trade and to tokenize without running into brick walls every time they change exchanges or switch regions. Because crypto is borderless, compliance needs to follow suit. Compliance needs to work everywhere, every time. 

That’s why the industry needs to collaborate to share information, adopt best practices and signal to the world that blockchain is open for business but closed to criminals who have nowhere to hide their ill-gotten gains.

We’ve mastered the AML tools. Now we need to master the art of talking. Exchange to exchange. Platform to platform. Region to region. FIU to obliged entities. TradFi with CeFi. That’s how crypto’s stance on money laundering goes from low-tolerance to no-tolerance.

If we can achieve that, the industry will flourish.

Opinion by: Ana Carolina Oliveira, chief compliance officer at Venga.