XRP, XLM, and the PayPal Mafia—it's one of those stories you grasps , once you understand it, you can't get out of your head. I was thinking about it again recently, and quite honestly inon of it feels coincidence. If you go back to the early 2000s, you have this group around PayPal.
People like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Back then, they already understood that money was becoming digital and that you could use it to transform entire systems. PayPal was really just the first step. After that, they didn't just get rich and sit back. They went exactly where power is created:
infrastructure, data, systems. And years later, Ripple wasn't built for hype, but for speed, for liquidity, for international payments. Exactly what a global financial system needs. And now it gets interesting. Peter Thiel, from precisely this circle, invests in this environment through his Founders Fund.
Not because he wants to pump money into any altcoin, but because he always invests in systems that replace existing structures. At the same time, you have Jed McCaleb. He wasn't with PayPal, but he operates in exactly this world. First Ripple, then he exited and created Stellar, or XLM. And suddenly, two networks exist: XRP, geared more towards banks and large players XLM, geared more towards access for people and payment networks.
This doesn't seem like competition. It seems more like two approaches to the same problem. And if you take a step back, you see the pattern: The people from that PayPal era keep building the same things. Money. Infrastructure. Control over systems. Just each time on a larger scale. PayPal was internet payments. XRP and XLM are moving towards global settlement. And that's precisely why XRP never feels like a "normal coin" to me. There's too much structure behind it.
Too many connections. Too many overlaps over decades. I'm not saying it's all a secret master plan. But I am saying: If you look at who's been working on the same topics for 20 years, it becomes clear that this isn't just any old crypto project. $XRP
