2019: BIS & ECB release their joint report with the Bank of Japan:“Project Stella.”

The public story: testing distributed ledger technology for cross-border settlement.

The private reality: Stella’s language reads like it was lifted straight from Ripple’s playbook. 🧵


2/🧵 The official report stated:

“DLT arrangements can support atomic settlement and deterministic finality in cross-border payments.”

That phrasing atomic settlement, deterministic finality is not generic blockchain jargon.
It is XRPL’s native vocabulary.

2018: The European Central Bank launches TIPS - TARGET Instant Payment Settlement.

On the surface, it looked like a retail upgrade: “instant euro payments, 24/7.”
But look closer.

The vocabulary, the timing, and the NDAs tell another story, one that points directly to Ripple and the XRP Ledger. 🧵 2/🧵 The official ECB release (Nov 2018) said:

“TIPS allows citizens and firms to transfer money in real time, 24/7, 365 days a year.”

Most people stopped reading there.
But buried in the technical annexes were phrases like:
•“Liquidity optimization across multi-currency corridors”
•“Protocol-neutral settlement frameworks”
•“Compliance metadata inseparable from transaction finality”

If you’ve read Ripple NDAs, you know those words are not accidental.

In 2017, Europe forced banks to open their APIs under PSD2.

The headlines were about “competition.”
But in the rooms where I sat, the conversation was about something else: liquidity + identity.
That’s where RippleNet quietly entered.

A thread. 🧵 2/🧵 The European Commission itself said (Jan 2018):

“PSD2 introduces strong customer authentication to reduce fraud and make online payments safer.”

Translation: every payment had to be identity-bound.
That meant banks needed rails that carried not just money, but compliance metadata.

I want to share something few have pieced together.
In 2015-2017, when Singapore launched Project Ubin, exploring DLT for interbank settlement, I witnessed behind closed doors how Ripple/XRP was quietly referenced in technical materials.

What I saw suggests much more was at play than “just an experiment.”
2/ Ubin’s public mandate (MAS):
From the MAS website:

“Project Ubin is a collaborative project with the industry to explore the use of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for clearing and settlement.”

They published pilot phases testing tokenised asset settlement, fast cross-border messaging, and settlement finality using DLT.

Let me tell you something I witnessed first-hand.

BRICS central banks have been working with the XRP Ledger for years. 🧵 2/🧵 My first exposure came in 2015.
I was working on a cross-border liquidity assessment involving European and Latin American flows.
In one of the briefing decks, Ripple corridors in Brazil were explicitly referenced as “neutral settlement experiments.”

The deck was circulated to both Santander Brazil and officials linked to Brazil’s central bank.

I’m about to expose something monumental.
It connects the ECB, secret NDAs, and the XRP Ledger.
Most people still don’t understand the layers beneath the headlines.

Stay focused. 🧵 2/🧵
Most think blockchain = cheap, fast payments.
That’s true, but governments don’t care.

They prefer a slow, expensive system that can identify every participant to a fast one that can’t.

Control > Efficiency. Always.

I’m going to tell you something you’ve probably never even thought about.

In 2015, while headlines screamed about Portugal’s banking collapse and bailouts, European banks were already piloting Ripple and XRP under NDA.

Banco Espírito Santo’s fall was not just a crisis, it was the pretext for testing the new financial rails. 🧵 2/🧵 The Collapse of Banco Espírito Santo (BES):
•In mid-2014, BES - Portugal’s second-largest bank reported losses of €3.6B.
•By 2015, the state stepped in, creating “Novo Banco” with €4.9B from Portugal’s bank resolution fund.
•The fragility of cross-border liquidity flows in Europe was laid bare.

This was a continental warning shot: correspondent banking chains couldn’t absorb shocks anymore.

🧵 In 2013, Cyprus depositors woke up to a nightmare.
Their savings were no longer theirs. To recapitalize the banks, deposits were forcibly “bailed in.”
Billions were seized overnight.

That event sent a chill through every boardroom I sat in. 🧵
2/🧵 The Cyprus bail-in proved a painful truth:
Bank deposits are not money. They are liabilities of fragile institutions.
When those institutions collapse, depositors are the first sacrifice.

This wasn’t just Cyprus. It was a warning shot to the entire global banking system.

Too many still reduce Ripple to “payments.”
That’s a profound misunderstanding.

Ripple and the XRP Ledger were structured, deliberately, for control across the entire stack of global finance and trade.
The surface layer is visible; the deeper protocols are not. 🧵 2/🧵 On the surface:
RippleNet corridors.
Bridge-asset functions of XRP.
CBDC pilots with central banks.
Announcements of banking partnerships.

This is what the public applauds, critiques, or litigates.
It is theatre.

I’ll never forget the summer of 2012.
The entire City was buzzing. Barclays had just been fined for manipulating LIBOR - the very benchmark underpinning trillions in contracts.

Some of us knew the truth: this wasn’t a “Barclays issue.”
It was a cartel problem. 🧵 2/🧵 For context:
LIBOR wasn’t just an interest rate.
It was the plumbing of global finance. Mortgages, derivatives, swaps… all priced off it.

And then it collapsed.
Because the “gentleman’s club” of banks had been submitting false rates for years.

The first NDA excerpt I will share is drawn from a Mutual Non-Disclosure and Strategic Cooperation Agreement executed between a Swiss banking major and an American blockchain infrastructure company.

What follows is merely the Purpose clause. The remainder of the agreement is even more revealing. 🧵 2/🧵 Purpose of the Agreement (excerpt):

“The Parties acknowledge their mutual interest in collaborating on the design, development, and validation of secure, real-time financial infrastructure that enables:
•Cross-border value transfer via neutral, protocol-agnostic mechanisms;
•Tokenization and settlement of regulated financial instruments leveraging distributed ledger technologies;
•Integration of identity-verified asset flows, incorporating frameworks for biometric identity mapping;
•Execution of real-time gross settlement (RTGS) simulations in conformity with next-generation financial messaging standards;
•Deployment of institution-grade messaging and liquidity channels for wholesale market transactions under emerging international frameworks.”

The world believes BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street are “asset managers.”
In truth, they formed the most powerful energy cartel in history, hiding under the ESG disguise.
This cartel triggered the very system designed to replace them: the XRP Ledger. 🧵 2/🧵 How the cartel worked:
•By dominating ETFs, they controlled equity flows.
•By pushing ESG mandates, they controlled capital allocation in energy.
•By sitting on each other’s boards, they insulated decisions from democratic oversight.

The result? A shadow government of finance.

Most people think the American government has been against XRP.
I’m here to tell you.. that may be the biggest misconception in this entire market.
From what I saw in top-level banker meetings back in 2012… it smells like the XRP Ledger was American-backed from day one. 🧵 2/🧵 I was working closely with some of the biggest banking executives in London at the time.
Meetings under NDAs.
Notes that never left the room.
And a strange vocabulary that hinted at something… deliberate.
Vaguely preparing for a system we now know as the XRP Ledger.

I’ve stayed silent for over a decade.
Because if I revealed what I knew too early, I’d be risking more than my reputation.

Ripple’s application to become a bank isn’t a pivot… it’s the endgame they’ve been building towards for 10+ years. 🧵 2/🧵 This isn’t about “crypto.”
It’s about owning the rails of the next financial era.
Broking. Custody. Banking. Capital markets.
The entire vertical stack… tokenized, regulated, and global.
I’ve seen the NDAs. The internal slides. The projected corridors.
I just can’t share them without revealing who I am.

I sat across mahogany boardroom tables with men who ran the world’s money.
In 2016–2017, I saw something most retail still refuses to believe:
Top executives from Barclays, HSBC, DBS, and Wells Fargo were already positioning around XRP.

I know. I was in the room. 2/🧵 These weren’t speculative “crypto bros.”
They were Group Treasurers, Heads of Correspondent Banking, FX Settlement Directors.
People who handle trillions in flows… the arteries of global finance.

And they weren’t debating if they’d use XRP.
They were debating how soon.

I turned a year-end banker bonus into the greatest decision of my life.

In April 2020, I left London with $127,000 in XRP at $0.18.

Everyone said I was insane.
Today, I’m in New York… not just wealthier, but freer.
Here’s how it happened.👇 2/🧵April 2020, COVID had the markets in chaos.
I was working in Canary Wharf, watching friends panic about job cuts and bonuses drying up.
But one night over drinks, a former HSBC colleague told me something I’d never forget:

“You’re looking at Bitcoin… but XRP is what the institutions really want.”