Something is shifting in how serious money thinks about digital assets. Juan Leon, Senior Investment Strategist at Bitwise, sat down with Paul Barron this week and made the case that the era of institutions dabbling with 1% crypto allocations is quietly coming to an end.
With the S&P hitting all-time highs, Bitcoin pushing back toward $80,000, and XRP on the move, Leon argued the sentiment backdrop is now strong enough to support a structural rethink. His view is that institutional and high-net-worth portfolios, which have traditionally capped digital asset exposure between 1% and 5%, could comfortably move toward 10% over the next few years.
“Morgan Stanley recently recommended an allocation of 7%,” Leon noted. “What used to be 1% has now moved to 3 to 5%. Some institutions are recommending beyond that.”
He said that Bitcoin captures the hard asset demand. Ethereum, Solana, and XRP are increasingly capturing the growth side.
RLUSD’s Breakout
Ripple’s stablecoin RLUSD, which sits on the XRP ledger, has grown its market cap by nearly 10 times in the past year alone, moving from roughly $100 to $200 million to somewhere between $1.5 and $1.9 billion.
That kind of growth does not happen by accident. Leon pointed to the GENIUS Act, Washington’s stablecoin legislation passed last year, as the catalyst that turned RLUSD from a niche product into a serious payment rail. With stablecoins now on a clear regulatory path and tokenisation of real-world assets accelerating, RLUSD’s expansion is becoming a meaningful argument for XRP’s broader utility.
“The advent of stablecoins becoming the new payment rails, with tokenisation growing in the next couple of years, is really attracting investors,” Leon said.
Infrastructure, Not Speculation
The most pointed part of the conversation came when Barron asked whether investors view XRP differently from other crypto ETFs. Leon’s answer was direct. Institutions are not buying XRP as a speculative token. They are buying it as a fintech infrastructure play.
Cross-border payments, remittances, stablecoin settlement, and Ripple’s move into prime brokerage through its treasury management acquisition are all folding into a single investment thesis. XRP is being positioned less like a cryptocurrency and more like a piece of financial plumbing that happens to trade on an exchange.
“I think they are looking at it as a multifaceted financial growth opportunity,” Leon said. “A settlement network for cross-border payments, remittances, stablecoins, and increasingly as a financial powerhouse serving institutions across all sorts of financial applications.”
With multi-trillion dollar cash reserves sitting on the sidelines and regulatory clarity continuing to improve, Leon’s broader point is hard to dismiss.
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