Charles Hoskinson said XRP holders do not share in the value Ripple builds when the company succeeds, arguing in a recent discussion that the token’s structure sends the gains elsewhere. Asked whether XRP holders still benefit when Ripple’s headlines lift the price in a bull market, Hoskinson said Ripple gave itself somewhere between 70% and 80% of the XRP supply and described the setup as one in which the company uses the attention to raise cash and buy assets.
“You got to understand that they gave themselves somewhere between 70 to 80% of the supply,” Hoskinson said. “The game is make the headlines, make the price go up, sell the XRP to other people, and then use the cash to buy assets.” He added that XRP holders have no legal ownership of those assets and said the prime broker, custody business, treasury management platform and acquisitions belong to Ripple as a private company with independent investors and shareholders. “There is nothing in the Ripple network that creates buy demand for the XRP token. Nothing,” he said.
Hoskinson said the token also lacks staking rewards or other built-in mechanisms that would feed value back to holders. He compared the arrangement to Tether, saying one company gets the value while holders are left with “some instrument and some network” without the same price appreciation. In his view, network activity can create direct buy demand only in a properly structured token model, and he pointed to Midnight and Hyperliquid as examples of systems designed that way.
He also cited EOS as a historical precedent. Hoskinson said Block One raised $4 billion building the EOS network and then declared it had no fiduciary obligation to the ecosystem, leaving holders with a token that went nowhere while the company’s treasury compounded. He said Ripple has been selling hundreds of millions to billions of dollars worth of XRP every year, with the cash flowing into Ripple rather than back into XRP. “When they do make revenue and profit, there is no buyback. The Ripple company is not going and buying back XRP,” he said.
The dispute goes to the center of a long-running question around XRP: whether holders are meant to profit only from price moves or also from value created by Ripple as a private company. Hoskinson’s answer was blunt. In his telling, Ripple’s business can expand, but XRP holders do not own the assets, do not get buybacks and do not have a built-in claim on the company’s profits. That, he said, is why the token’s gains stop at the trade.
