Moonrock Capital CEO Slams Ripple: ’Fake It Till You Make It—On Steroids’

Ripple’s relentless hype machine just got called out—hard. Moonrock Capital’s chief didn’t hold back, comparing XRP’s playbook to a high-stakes bluff wrapped in regulatory loopholes.

Wall Street’s favorite crypto punching bag? Maybe. But with Ripple’s legal team burning cash faster than a memecoin rug pull, even the suits are starting to notice the smell.

Ripple = A High Agency Creator

The bid has also rekindled a long-running debate about the role that founding teams and their affiliated foundations should play once a network is live. Hunter Horsley, chief executive officer of Bitwise Asset Management, argued on X that the market often overlooks “the role of creators in commercialization.”

Horsley argued that the episode illustrates the “high-agency creator” model increasingly common among Layer-1 protocols. He set up a spectrum with three archetypes. “No agency creator: Bitcoin. Medium agency creator: Ethereum, Bittensor, etc. High agency creator: Solana, Avalanche, Aptos, Sui, Ripple, etc.”

The Bitwise CEO added that projects in the third category “have Labs and foundations alongside them with resources, organized talent, and a desire to foster adoption.” In his view, the capacity of such entities to “bend fate to win” means that “the best product doesn’t always win. Sometimes it’s the best go-to-market. Are you factoring this dimension into your expectations?”

In other words, Horsley sees Ripple’s acquisitive streak as a textbook example of high-agency strategy in action, contrasting with protocols such as Bitcoin that rely almost exclusively on emergent community coordination. Dedic’s critique, by contrast, frames Ripple’s approach as opportunistic asset-flipping financed by treasury XRP sales.

At press time, XRP traded at $2.22.