XRP vs XLM vs HBAR: Which Payment Crypto Are Institutions Actually Using?

XRP vs XLM vs HBAR: Which Payment Crypto Are Institutions Actually Using?

Sam Daodu

Mon, July 27, 2026 at 4:14 PM GMT+3 7 min read

• XRP-USD +1.19%

Quick Read

• Mastercard picked XRP's ledger for card settlement, MoneyGram chose Stellar for its dollar stablecoin, and the UK Treasury endorsed Hedera for FX collateral.

• Swift bypassed all three networks entirely, building its blockchain ledger on Consensys' Linea with 17 banks set to pilot live transactions.

• XRP leads institutional investment with 5 spot ETFs holding nearly $1 billion, while XLM has no dedicated ETF and all three coins are down over 59% in the past year.

• Two retirees, same $1 million, same 4% rule, buy one finished with $1.4 million, the other hit $0 in 12 years. Our free reader guide explains the flaw that separated them, and the income-first method built to avoid it.

Institutions have been moving money across blockchains in recent years. And this year, they have gone further, with Mastercard opening card settlement to stablecoins across eight blockchains on June 3, and Swift launching its own blockchain ledger on July 9 with 17 banks lined up to pilot live transactions.

Ripple's XRP (CRYPTO:XRP), Stellar's XLM and Hedera's HBAR all target that institutional market. XRP bridges currencies for cross-border payments, Stellar issues and moves stablecoins across borders, and Hedera hosts tokenized assets for banks and asset managers. So which of these three payment cryptos are institutions using the most?

What XRP, XLM and HBAR Are Each Built For

XRP works as a bridge asset, and with a market cap of $68.81 billion, it is by far the largest of the three cryptos. A firm converting pesos to yen buys XRP with the pesos, sends it across the XRP Ledger, and sells it for yen a few seconds later. This saves the firm from keeping money parked in accounts around the world waiting for payments to arrive as traditional payments require. The coin is the product here, since every transfer means someone buying and selling XRP.

What's interesting is that Stellar came out of the same family as XRP, since Jed McCaleb co-founded Ripple before leaving to start Stellar in 2014, and the two networks look similar underneath.

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Stellar built a network where the money moving is a stablecoin rather than the native token. XLM covers transaction fees and the minimum balance every account has to hold, and its market cap of $6.1 billion is roughly a tenth of XRP's. Circle's USDC, MoneyGram's MGUSD, and Société Générale's euro stablecoin are all issued directly on it.

Hedera isn't a payments network at all. It runs as an enterprise ledger governed by a council of large companies, with Google, IBM, Boeing, and FedEx among them, each operating a node. Its institutional work is tokenizing assets and moving collateral rather than settling payments, and HBAR pays the fees for that activity. With a market cap of $3.07 billion, it is the smallest of the three coins.

Which Networks Institutions Have Chosen

Mastercard's list of eight blockchains names XRP's ledger and does not include Stellar, and Ripple's RLUSD is one of only six stablecoins the service approved. Eight chains is a shortlist rather than an exclusive endorsement, and the rollout starts in the U.S. and Latin America before going further.

However, very little of Ripple's own business runs through XRP. Brad Garlinghouse told CNBC in June that the company processes about $16 trillion a year across the payment and clearing businesses it has bought, and that digital assets, XRP included, make up "close to zero percent" of that volume.

Meanwhile, MoneyGram picked Stellar, launching its own dollar stablecoin natively on the network in June and building on a partnership that goes back to 2021. The token went live in the U.S. first, with a global rollout planned across a cash network reaching 60 million customers.

Moreover, Stellar is also the only one of the three coins that publishes what it moves, at $5.5 billion in stablecoin payments in the first quarter, up 72% on the year. Neither Ripple nor Hedera puts out a comparable figure, so nobody can rank the three on payment traffic.

The UK Treasury handed Hedera its own endorsement in July, with its first Wholesale Digital Markets Champion report singling out an FX trade that Lloyds, Aberdeen and Archax settled on the network in July 2025, using tokenized money market funds and UK gilts as collateral.

Yet, the biggest name in cross-border payments passed on all three. Swift, which connects more than 11,500 financial institutions, announced on July 9 that its own blockchain ledger is ready for use, built on Consensys' Linea rather than on any of these networks, with 17 banks preparing to pilot live transactions.

Which One Wall Street Is Buying

The SEC and CFTC issued joint interpretive guidance in March treating XRP, XLM and HBAR as digital commodities rather than securities, which cleared the way for institutions to hold all three without worrying about breaking securities rules.

XRP was already ahead by then, since its first spot ETFs launched in November 2025, and five funds now hold $997 million between them on $1.49 billion of cumulative inflows, with Bitwise running the largest. Hedera has one HBAR fund, Canary's on Nasdaq, which has taken in $104.85 million and holds $49.68 million, but Stellar has none.

A spot ETF only exists because an issuer put up capital, cleared the paperwork and took on the running costs, all on a bet that investors want that coin specifically. Five issuers made that bet on XRP and one on HBAR.

XLM exposure does exist, but it's just bundled inside broader products. T. Rowe Price's active crypto ETF began trading on July 16 with XLM among its 17 eligible assets, and Hashdex's index fund holds it too.

Which One Are Institutions Using?

Institutions are using all three cryptos, and the one they choose depends entirely on what they need. Mastercard needed settlement rails, MoneyGram needed a stablecoin, and Lloyds needed somewhere to park collateral. None of those firms was choosing between XRP, XLM and HBAR, but picking the one that fulfills their needs.

Meanwhile, Swift is the exception worth watching. It connects more than 11,500 financial institutions and moves the equivalent of world GDP every two to three days, and when it built its own blockchain ledger this month, it went to Consensys' Linea rather than any of the three networks. So, the largest player in cross-border payments would rather run infrastructure it controls than settle on a public network it does not.

That said, none of the three coins has paid off for holders yet, with the XRP price down about 65% over the past year, while XLM and HBAR have plunged 59% and 75% respectively too. What is left is for the utility of each network to start reaching the coins, so the prices finally reflect the growth.

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