Ripple’s Swell 2025 conference in New York may have provided one of the defining moments in the digital asset industry’s relationship with Wall Street. First of all, the XRP community received the long-awaited confirmation.
During the keynote session, Maxwell Stein of BlackRock’s digital assets team told the audience that “the market is ready for large-scale adoption of blockchain” and that Ripple’s infrastructure could soon move trillions of dollars onto the chain.
Stein praised early industry developers like Ripple for proving the real-world benefits of blockchain, not just as a speculative concept, but as a functioning layer of financial infrastructure.
“They’ve already flagged fixed income, bonds, stablecoins … that’s where it all started. But these are the rails of trillions of capital flows,” Stein said.
BlackRock’s chief executive publicly credited Ripple for helping to prove blockchain functionality in the real world, a milestone in a narrative that XRP owners have been fighting for years.
The comment came as a thunderbolt to the community, which has long argued that Ripple’s technology would bolster institutional liquidity.
For the longest time, the XRP community held onto the belief that Ripple technology would be a bridge between traditional finance and the decentralized economy.
XRP supporters X (Twitter) noted Stein’s statement as a long-awaited confirmation from the world’s largest asset manager.
“We’ve seen what the early adopters of cryptocurrencies have done – they’ve shown us what’s possible. And now the market is ready for wider adoption,” he added.
His statement highlighted a shift in tone from TradFi that blockchain is no longer an experiment. Rather, it is the new standard.
But the excitement that followed was tempered by legal caution. Australian lawyer and prominent XRP advocate Bill Morgan was one of the first to raise questions about Stein’s remarks. He wondered if they represented BlackRock’s official position or were simply Stein’s personal opinion.
