XRP vs HBAR: Ripple's Bank vs Hedera's Council, Compared

Hbar trades at about 7 cents right now, and just like XRP, its goal is a piece of the 18.9 trillion dollar that Boston Consulting Group and Ripple say will be tokenized by 2033, but it's going after the opposite way because XRP has Ripple, one company that just got its own federally chartered Trust Bank, while Hedera is run by a board of 33 giants like Google, IBM, and FedEx. So people have been saying Hbar is the coin the banks trust, the one to own right next to your XRP. And in October, the two finally went head-to-head on the exact same job when Aviva, one of Britain's biggest money managers, put part of a 22 billion pound fund on the XRP ledger, the same kind of fund that Aberdeen has had on Hedera since 2023. But after all of that, both coins are down about 32% this year within a fraction of a point of each other. And on the day of the Binance hack, they both fell together.

On October 16th, Hbar neared 8 cents after its September pump. We said on this channel. So if you're looking at Hbar right now, the worst thing you can do is chase the next big green candle. So if you're holding any coin betting on the banker coin story like XRP, Hbar, XLM, or Quant, watch this because by the end, you'll know which of these two strategies actually pays the people holding the coin and why owning both protects you a lot less than it looks. So if you're feeling bullish, like this video and smash that subscribe button, we are on our way to 400,000 subscribers and we can't get there without you.

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I'm Ryan Huggins, aka at win with Ryan. Welcome back to the channel. So let's start with who's actually in charge of each network because that bank and that board are where these two strategies split. Ripple is a company with a CEO and a balance sheet. And in October, it collected the two things most crypto firms never get, a Federal Trust Bank charter on October 26th and BNY holding XRP for its clients the very next day.

It spent about $2.5 billion on deals in 2025. And its conference in October, its CEO said Ripple expects to end the year earning at the pace of about $900 million a year. What a lot of people miss is that Ripple doesn't run the XRP ledger itself because any change to it needs more than 80% of the trusted validators to agree for two straight weeks. Hedera went the other way because no single company runs it at all. It's governed by a council of 33 organizations including Google, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, FedEx, and Norma and Santander Bank.

And each member gets one equal vote for a maximum of two three-year terms while the members run the network's nodes themselves. One of those members, the crypto custodian BitGo, explained on Hedera's own channel why big clients like that setup.

We have talked to clients who say they are a little bit nervous or unsure how to handle a situation where a public blockchain might be validated by a complete unknown.

So Ripple builds a bank, Hedera builds a board, and each one is a real answer to the same fear big money has about crypto. The weakness on Hedera side is that seats on the board can empty out, and Boeing left the council in February 2025. Singapore's DBS left in 2024, and Hitachi's name dropped off of the council's website in September. The board keeps adding names as well because FedEx joined in February, and McLaren and Accenture were announced this spring. So the seats turn over with new companies filling them.

The weakness on Ripple side is that a company can grow its business without its coin going anywhere, which is exactly what XRP holders watched happen in 2026. So the fair test is the jobs they actually landed, and the cleanest one is that fund that they've both ended up running. The job was a money market fund. It's about the most boring thing in finance, which is why it matters, because it's where companies and pension funds park their cash. They need to be able to grab it any moment.

In June of 2023, the token company Archax put its stake in Aberdeen Sterling Money Market Fund on Hedera. And in July 2025, Lloyd's Bank accepted those tokens as collateral on a real currency trade. That trade mattered because a bank took the token itself as security for its money, which is the moment that a token stops being a demo. On October 26th, Aviva Investors put a £50 million share class of its £22 billion Sterling fund on the XRP ledger, with BNY holding the fund's assets. And that's Aviva's second fund on XRP's network since July.

Hedera got to that job first, and the XRP ledger is now doing it at a bigger scale. Aberdeen's dollar fund has also been on the XRP ledger through the same token company since November of 2024. So, the two networks share customers more than either holder base admits. The biggest tracker of tokenized assets puts about $642 million of real-world assets on the XRP Ledger that investors can actually trade against about $91 million on Hedera. So, XRP's network is about seven times ahead, but XRP's network also gets credited with about $4.8 billion in assets that are only recorded there.

About 80% of that comes from just two platforms, and the tokenized assets moving on XRP's network over the last month were down more than 99%. Hedera fans point to a real estate company called Red Swan that says it is tokenized over $5 billion on Hedera, but the same tracker can only find about 64 million of it. And the bigger stage has been tough on both of them because the DTCC's tokenization service went live on October 28th on two other networks. An Australia Central Bank test that gets quoted a lot ran on a private version of Hedera's technology because the regulators kept the Central Bank's own digital money off of public chains. So, when a headline puts either coin next to Wall Street, wait for the transaction count before you buy because a seat in a working group and a real money moving on the network are two very different things.

So, on the jobs, neither side has run away with it yet. And the better way to split them is to score the company and the coin separately. Start with the company. And on that, Ripple wins easily because Hedera's council doesn't sell anything or earn a profit from winning a customer. Hashgraph, the company that builds Hedera's software, is a separate business, and none of what it earns flows to people holding HBAR.

So, Ripple is the stronger business, and your job as an XRP holder is to check whether that business ever creates buyers for the coin because in October, it didn't. As a coin to own, the difference between them comes down to size and spread. And that decides how much of each you can hold. XRP is about 25 times bigger, and the spot XRP funds in the United States held about $1.5 billion at the end of October, while the only US spot HBAR fund held about $57 million. HBAR has less supply left to hit the market, since about 89% is already out, while Ripple still holds around $31 billion XRP in escrow, a known scheduled overhang.

It unlocks a billion at a time each month. HBAR also swings much harder, because it jumped 27% on September 28th on an IBM headline, and then it fell 16% the next day, and it's down about 41% since that top. Every XRP transaction also destroys a tiny amount of XRP, while Hedera pays its fees out to the companies running the network and to people staking. So busy days on Hedera don't shrink the supply at all. So XRP is the coin you can hold at a bigger size, and HBAR is one that you hold small and only add to it on quiet days.

I'm not going to pick one for you because that is an answer that depends on a bet only you can make. If you buy XRP, you're trusting one company to make banks need the coin. And if you buy HBAR, you're trusting 33 companies to make their own apps needed. Put that reason in your notes app next to the price that you paid, so the next headline can't talk you out of it. Holding both is where the Binance hack comes in.

On October 29th, when $6.3 billion was stolen, XRP fell 6.7% and HBAR fell 8% on the news that that nothing to do with either network. Over the past year, on almost every day, either coin moved more than 5%. They moved in the same direction all but once. So if you hold both, add the two positions together and ask whether you'd be fine with the total falling 8% in a day for a reason that has nothing to do with either coin because that's what October 29th did. Even Grayscale's head of product on Ripple's own channel framed it around spreading out.

And thinking about how they diversify amongst [music] the other 50% or so of the crypto market cap, that's not Bitcoin.

Real diversification means owning things that behave differently across the cycle. And these two coins so far mostly don't. What could change that is a handful of things coming in 2027. The first is the DTCC, which plans to add more networks to its tokenization service in 2027. And it has already named Stellar for the first half of the year.

So if either XRP's Ledger or Hedera gets picked next, that's real usage. And until it happens, a seat in the working group isn't a reason to buy. Then there's XRP Ledger's own lending feature, which has been written but isn't switched on yet. So that's another one that we're watching. And the last one is AI because on October 8th, Hedera announced accounts let AI agents spend money under limits their owners sets with the live version targeted for the second quarter of 2027.

XRP's network is already doing some of this because in October, Ripple's Ripple X said their XRP Ledger had passed 13 million AI agent payments using a payment standard called X402, about a quarter of its activity, though the dollar amounts are still tiny. So if agents start paying fees at scale on either network, that's the first demand for either coin that doesn't depend on a headline. FedEx, which joined the council in February, explained on Hedera's channel why it wants AI and a ledger together.

AI agents will act and we think DLT and blockchain will enforce. Uh and said another way, you want you want both, right? You need both.

So keep an eye on the fees on both networks and treat the AI story as a promise until they grow. Through all of that, decide how much of your portfolio goes into these enterprise coins before you buy. Set your take profit levels ahead of time and don't chase the next big green candle. The rest belongs in things that don't fall together, like coins doing completely different jobs or plain cash ready for the next big move. I still believe in XRP long term, but I diversify and HBAR is a good example of why owning a second coin isn't the same thing as spreading your risk.

And spreading your risk is only half of it because when you buy matters just as much. On October 16th, a few weeks after HBAR September pump, we said the worst move was to chase the next green candle and anyone who listened skipped that 13% drop. If you bought HBAR on that 27% day or you held it next to XRP to feel safer, October 29th showed you both of them falling together on the same morning. Inside the private intelligence network that we run, the analysts on our team check the transaction counts behind the headlines, like the DTCC and Aviva, the same day that they're announced. And our members get the price levels before any of it hits YouTube.

There's a live education session every week on sizing and on when to sell part of a winner. Members get our team's research on the altcoins worth watching and they call before they make a move. And everyone keeps their own keys and they do it alongside serious investors who build portfolios around the cycle instead of around one coin. When the next XRP versus headline goes viral, you'll either be picking a side in the comments or you'll already know how both coins behave on a bad day and how much of each you hold. We keep each month's intake small because our team works one-on-one with each new member.

Click the first link in the description, watch the free briefing, and if it makes sense, book a call. And then we'll review your portfolio together. And if it's not a fit for you, then we'll tell you. As always, you know what to do. Stay bullish.

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