#2026年比特币价格展望 Stanford alumnus and serial entrepreneur Chris Larsen has rewritten the imagination space of fintech with one name — he not only brought P2P online lending from theory to practice (Prosper platform in 2005), but also in 2012 co-created a distributed ledger system that enables three-second cross-border settlements via XRP.

In just a few years, over 300 global financial institutions have integrated into this system — from Standard Chartered to Santander, from regional banks to multinational groups. The protocol's scale has surged into the hundreds of billions, making it seem like a true reformer of the old financial system has emerged.

But reality is more complex. At the end of 2020, regulatory storms suddenly erupted, and a lawsuit wave swept in. Amid market panic, Larsen’s personal holdings of 7 billion XRP evaporated 90% of their value in a short period — this bill alone exceeded $15 billion in a single day, setting an extreme record for individual losses in cryptocurrency history.

The turning point came in 2021. Amid the tug-of-war between belief and reality, Larsen donated XRP worth around $500 million to charitable organizations. His statement was straightforward: "If the technology you bet on ultimately can't save the world, then the technology itself has no value." Behind this is a re-examination of the original intention of innovation.

He also expressed a widely circulated view: "Banks have never been the root of the problem; outdated systems are." $BTC The fluctuations of $ETH, to some extent, revolve around this core proposition — what can new financial infrastructure truly change, and what are its limitations.