Wall Street Picks XRP, XLM & POL, But Holders May Not Get Paid

Franklin Templeton, a decades-old traditional finance heavyweight, has acquired a digital asset firm and created a dedicated crypto unit aimed at big clients including sovereign wealth funds. According to the analyst, the firm named four blockchains as core infrastructure; three are retail favorites: XRP, Stellar (XLM) and Polygon (POL).

Fire Hustle's key claim: “A blockchain can process billions of dollars in business for the biggest institutions and the token you hold in your wallet can capture almost none of that value.” What matters is whether institutional flows are forced through the native token, or whether they can ride on top via stablecoins and tokenized assets without needing to hold it.

That’s where the three networks sharply diverge. Ripple, the company behind XRP, has launched its own stablecoin, RLUSD. The analyst argues this stablecoin now directly competes with XRP’s original “bridge asset” role.

If banks can settle cross-border flows in RLUSD, they have “zero reason to take on the price risk of holding XRP,” even as Ripple signs deals with BlackRock, Deutsche Bank and Mastercard. RLUSD has reportedly grown to nearly $2 billion in supply while XRP’s price has slid from its 2023 highs.

Stellar, long used as a cheap payments and settlement rail, historically suffered from value “leakage”: institutions could use the network without needing to hold much XLM.

An upgrade called Soroban has changed that dynamic, the analyst says, by allowing full financial products — lending, yields and other on-chain services — to be built directly on Stellar.

That keeps activity on-chain instead of migrating elsewhere. The value of real-world assets on Stellar, such as tokenized Treasury funds, grew 91% in a single quarter to more than $1.5 billion, according to Summer a.k.a Fire Hustle.

Franklin Templeton explicitly naming XLM adds to that momentum. Still, the Stellar Development Foundation holds a large XLM treasury and releases tokens to fund the ecosystem, creating persistent sell pressure. Low transaction costs also mean users don’t need large balances to interact with the network.

Polygon, meanwhile, is presented as the most underappreciated of the three. Its token, POL, has been “down badly this year,” trading near the bottom of its range. But Polygon burns a portion of tokens with every transaction.

She cites an effective burn rate of roughly 3.5% annually — more than double its staking rewards — meaning higher network usage should decrease net supply.

Activity from apps like Polymarket, a prediction market built on Polygon, and Franklin Templeton’s use of Polygon in the back office of a tokenized fund are already feeding that burn. However, the business side is still loss-making; Polygon Labs reportedly lost over $26 million in the past year as operating costs exceeded fee revenue.

Fire Hustle frames this as the “brutal truth” for token holders: corporate wins and big-brand partnerships do not automatically translate into token appreciation. Tokens only benefit if they are structurally embedded in how value flows through the network — via mandatory gas, burns, collateral or similar mechanisms — and not sidelined by stablecoins or off-chain accounting.

Summer stresses this is a thesis, not a guarantee. Institutional adoption could move slowly, token economics could underperform, and broader macro shocks could swamp everything. But as Franklin Templeton and other legacy players quietly build on-chain, the distinction between “network winning” and “token winning” is becoming harder for investors to ignore.

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