Rob Cunningham: The Big Ripple Infrastructure Picture
Rob Cunningham: The Big Ripple Infrastructure Picture
7-27-2027
The Big Ripple Infrastructure Picture: Context is Everything
The protocol creates the network.
The infrastructure company creates the services.
The liquidity providers help value move efficiently.
Financial institutions provide regulated access.
Applications create user experiences.
Each layer can become valuable for different reasons.
If one imagines a future where open value-transfer protocols like XRPL/ILP become as foundational to finance as TCP/IP became to the internet, then the long-term significance of companies like @Ripple that have spent 15+ years building enterprise infrastructure around those protocols could be substantial.
Notably, because the XRPL/ILP protocols are open-source, no single company can own the network itself, and multiple participants are free to build successful products and services on the same shared foundation.
KUWL Takeaway
TCP/IP didn’t become valuable because someone owned it. It became invaluable because everyone could use it.
If open-source XRPL/ILP financial protocols achieve similar global interoperability for value transfer, the greatest opportunities will lie not in owning the protocol itself, but in building trusted, regulated, high-performance infrastructure that helps the world use it.
The King of Engineering DLT benefits and invaluable protocols the world over will soon be fully recognized with an Act of Clarity.
Three reasonable valuation lenses add better context:
Replacement Value
“What would it cost to recreate?”
Replacing today’s global Internet protocols, infrastructure, standards, software, routing systems, and interoperability would likely cost tens of trillions of dollars and take decades.
Reasonable estimate: $20–50 trillion
Economic Dependency Value
“How much GDP depends upon TCP/IP?”
Nearly every modern industry now relies on TCP/IP:
Banking
Payments
Communications
Cloud computing
AI
Healthcare
Transportation
Defense
Manufacturing
Retail
Education
Global GDP today exceeds $120 trillion annually.
If TCP/IP vanished tomorrow, enormous portions of global commerce would stop almost immediately.
One could reasonably argue TCP/IP enables $40–80+ trillion of annual economic activity.
Infrastructure that enables that much production would likely be valued well above a single year’s output.
Reasonable implied value: $100–300 trillion
Strategic Utility Value
This is the interesting one.
Utilities often become more valuable than many companies built upon them.
For example:
Interstate highways
Electrical grid
GPS
Shipping lanes
Air traffic control
None generate profits proportional to their societal value.
TCP/IP belongs in this category.
Its value comes from being:
Universal
Neutral
Permissionless
Open
Interoperable
Those characteristics create enormous network effects that are difficult to replicate.
Many economists could plausibly argue TCP/IP societal value approaches several hundred trillion dollars.
Ripple, building with RippleNet, XRP and a portfolio of 900+ talented professionals, patented solutions, extraordinary compliance, prestigious customers and global legislation running atop an Open Protocol Internet of Value, should become an enterprise of value without any historical precedent.
Source(s):
• https://x.com/KuwlShow/status/2081438156411265073
https://dinarchronicles.com/2026/07/26/rob-cunningham-the-big-ripple-infrastructure-picture