Ripple's Failed Bets and Strategic Pivots: What Didn't Work — and What Changed

A company that claims every experiment was a success is either unusually lucky or rewriting its own history. Technology strategy is a portfolio of bets. Some become products. Some become infrastructure used in a different form. Some disappear because the market is not ready, the economics are poor or a better opportunity arrives.

Ripple is no exception.

The useful question is not “Has Ripple ever failed?” Of course it has. The useful question is what kind of failure occurred, who actually owned the project and whether the company learned anything from it.

Codius: smart contracts before the market was ready

Codius was an early Ripple-backed smart-contract platform. In 2015 Ripple stopped active development, with contemporary reporting quoting the company's view that the decentralised-applications market was still small and immature.

That looks like a failed product bet, but the underlying work did not vanish completely. Stefan Thomas, then a senior Ripple technologist, later drew on related ideas while developing Interledger and Coil. Codius also illustrates a pattern that would recur across crypto: being early can be indistinguishable from being wrong for several years.

Ethereum's later rise showed there *was* a huge smart-contract market. It does not prove Ripple should have kept funding Codius indefinitely. Companies have finite engineering attention. Ripple increasingly concentrated on payments, where it believed it had a more direct institutional customer problem to solve.

Xpring: a deliberate expansion beyond bank payments

In 2018 Ripple created Xpring, an initiative to invest in, incubate, acquire and grant funds to entrepreneurs building around XRP and the XRP Ledger. The strategy was ambitious: make XRP useful in more places than cross-border banking.

Xpring backed or worked with a wide range of teams. This is where historical retellings often become sloppy. A company receiving Ripple/Xpring support was not automatically a Ripple subsidiary. A founder receiving XRP from individual Ripple executives was not the same as Ripple acquiring the business.

Omni is a good example of the distinction

Omni, a storage and rental startup, announced a financing arrangement in which Ripple executives participated using XRP. TechCrunch reported that Ripple itself did not simply buy Omni. Xpring later highlighted Omni among ecosystem initiatives. The hoped-for consumer XRP use never became a durable mainstream case.

Calling that “Ripple's failed company” is inaccurate. Calling it an ecosystem bet that failed to establish lasting XRP utility is fairer.

Coil: serious experiment, eventual shutdown

Coil was founded by former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas to build a new model for paying creators through web monetisation and Interledger. Ripple/Xpring supported the effort, and XRP was part of its settlement vision.

The idea attacked a real economic problem: the web is dominated by advertising, subscriptions and platforms that take large cuts. Coil tried to make tiny streaming payments practical so a user could compensate websites and creators as they consumed content.

In February 2023 Coil announced that it would wind down its products and development, closing the service the following month. The open letter framed the company as a stepping stone toward a broader Interledger ecosystem and pointed to work moving into the Interledger Foundation.

Commercially, the Coil consumer product did not become a lasting mass-market service. Technically, parts of the underlying payments work continued elsewhere. Both statements can be true.

Xpring itself became RippleX

In 2020 Ripple renamed and reorganised Xpring as RippleX. A rename is not automatically failure, but it marked a shift from broad venture-style ecosystem experimentation toward developer infrastructure and XRP Ledger adoption inside a more coherent Ripple organisation.

That is a strategic pivot: narrow the mission, integrate the team and focus on tools that can support a larger network rather than trying to manufacture individual consumer applications one by one.

Other “failures” that need careful language

Ripple's product names have changed repeatedly. xCurrent, xVia and xRapid gave way to RippleNet and ODL, and more recent branding uses Ripple Payments. Product consolidation can mean an old name disappears even when functionality survives.

Likewise, an investment can produce a poor financial return while teaching the investor something valuable about customers. A grant-funded project can end without implying fraud or incompetence. Crypto history is full of pilots that were technically functional but commercially unnecessary.

This is why any “Ripple graveyard” should separate at least four categories:

discontinued Ripple products;

independent companies that received investment;

projects supported with grants or XRP;

product names folded into successor offerings.

Otherwise the article becomes a list of things that happened near Ripple rather than an analysis of decisions Ripple actually controlled.

What appears to have changed strategically?

The broad direction over time is visible. Ripple began with a wide vision for value transfer, explored smart contracts and ecosystem applications, then concentrated more heavily on regulated institutional infrastructure: payments, liquidity, custody, tokenisation and enterprise digital assets.

That focus does not guarantee success. It does, however, reflect a lesson common in enterprise technology: selling one critical piece of infrastructure to institutions can be easier to defend than persuading millions of consumers to change behaviour at the same time.

A successful pivot is not proof that every earlier project was a waste. Codius helped build technical knowledge. Coil pushed Interledger and web-monetisation ideas. Xpring cultivated developers and investments. The economically honest assessment is mixed: some consumer-facing ambitions did not scale, while parts of the technology and talent fed into later directions.

Related reading: Ripple partnerships, past and present; Practical barriers to payments adoption.

XRP for Newbies

Ripple has funded and built many ideas over the years. Some, such as Codius and Coil's consumer service, were discontinued. Others were independent startups that Ripple or its executives supported, not businesses Ripple owned. A failed experiment does not automatically mean XRP or XRPL failed — and a successful Ripple business pivot does not automatically make XRP more valuable either.

The Bottom Line

Ripple's history looks more like a normal technology company than either its strongest critics or strongest fans sometimes admit. It placed bets, closed projects, funded experiments and changed direction. Codius and Coil show that useful technology can arrive before a viable business model. Xpring shows that ecosystem growth cannot simply be bought. Ripple's later concentration on institutional financial infrastructure is, in part, the product of those earlier experiments.