Thanks to @VincentSco72192 asking the question directly to @JoelKatz in Vegas, we now know that @ripple has built an entire financial system. It has taken me some time to fully grasp what that means as someone relatively new to the XRP community. For anyone else interested in the logic here’s where I landed. See comments below 👇 The question originally posed by @VincentSco72192 describes a system where real-world assets (RWAs) and treasuries (potentially gold in the future) back RLUSD as the “unit of account,” transacting over the decentralized XRP Ledger (XRPL) as the “method of payment,” using XRP as the “means of exchange” (for gas fees or conversions), with settlements in 3–5 seconds for assets with trust lines.

(1) A financial system is a network of institutions, technologies, and protocols that facilitates the transfer, storage, and management of value, including payments, investments, lending, and asset exchange.

By confirming that Ripple’s ecosystem constitutes a financial system, @JoelKatz likely acknowledges that the combination of XRPL, XRP, RLUSD, and related tools forms a cohesive infrastructure capable of performing core financial functions, particularly for payments and asset tokenization, with potential to expand into other areas.

(2) Ripple’s financial system, is a blockchain-based ecosystem where XRPL serves as a decentralized ledger, XRP facilitates liquidity and fees, RLUSD provides stability, and RWAs anchor value, enabling rapid payments, tokenization, and DeFi. Its profound impact lies in disrupting legacy finance, fostering inclusion, and gaining institutional traction, as evidenced by partnerships, regulatory wins, and community momentum. This validates XRP’s potential to reshape global finance, promising economic, technological, and social benefits.

(3) The impact and byproduct of this new system ranges profoundly. It is the equivalent of moving from as @xrpmickle said: “from a paper mail system to email” improve businesses and cross border payments all the way to replacing the FED system entirely based on its efficiency to work as an entire system not just a bridge asset.