Attorney Bill Morgan has weighed in on one of the more heated debates circulating in crypto communities this week: whether investors who swapped XRP for Stellar’s XLM made a mistake. “People who swapped XRP for XLM did not necessarily make an incorrect call,” Morgan wrote on X. “Time will decide that question.”
The Real Mistake Was Not the Swap
Morgan’s argument is not that XLM is better or worse than XRP. His point is narrower and arguably more useful. Investors who rotated from XRP into XLM may have misread the nature of XLM’s recent price surge, believing it reflected something fundamentally different about Stellar’s prospects rather than simply Bitcoin-driven momentum lifting the broader market.
Both XRP and XLM, Morgan said are directionally correlated to Bitcoin’s price movement. When Bitcoin moves, both tokens tend to follow. The green candle XLM printed recently was always going to retreat once that Bitcoin momentum faded. Investors who treated it as a signal of XLM’s independent strength, rather than a market-wide tide, may have misjudged the timing of their entry.
The DTCC Argument
Some community members have pointed to two recently published DTCC patents as supporting the case for XLM. However, analysts have noted the patents reference compatible distributed ledger frameworks broadly, including the XRP Ledger and other networks, without mandating any single protocol. Morgan’s position is consistent with that reading.
The Investor Framework
The question worth asking, according to analysts, is not which asset is pumping this week but which one is built to win over the next five to ten years. Rotating a long-term position in response to a marketing announcement, which is what the Stellar-DTCC narrative amounts to for many observers, is precisely the kind of short-term thinking that has cost investors in every previous cycle.
Morgan’s conclusion remains the most balanced take available: both assets have credible cases, both move with Bitcoin, and the market has not yet rendered its verdict.
