XRP vs Zebec Network (ZBCN): Utility, Market Potential, and Price Predictions

Is ZBCN the next XRP? 🚀 Price surging, major partnerships brewing — full breakdown with price targets, and why I hold both.

Why compare Ripple’s XRP and Zebec’s ZBCN now? Both projects are at intriguing crossroads in 2025, each aiming to reinvent how money moves in the real world. Ripple, an established player targeting cross-border finance, is fresh off partial vindication in its U.S. legal battle (a 2023 court ruled that secondary sales of XRP were not securities reuters.com) and is driving crypto integration into traditional banking. Zebec Network, a younger upstart, is rapidly making a name in on-chain payroll and payments – even catching Ripple’s attention. In a recent X (Twitter) Spaces, Zebec’s COO Siman Babakhani revealed that Ripple “has been in direct talks with Zebec over the last couple of weeks on some kind of partnership or collaborative deal” linkedin.com. This unexpected connection between an OG like Ripple and a rising DeFi project like Zebec underscores their shared focus: using blockchain to disrupt massive financial markets in real-time. This article will explore the parallels and contrasts between XRP and ZBCN, from their target use cases and market sizes to their communities and outlook, all with an eye on tangible, real-world adoption.

Similarities

Despite very different origins, XRP and ZBCN have striking similarities in vision and scope:

• Targeting Massive Financial Flows: Both aim at multi-hundred-billion (or even trillion) dollar markets. XRP is designed to facilitate cross-border payments—remittances and foreign exchange. Zebec’s scope is even broader, eyeing the global payroll and continuous payment market (essentially all salaries, subscriptions, and payment streams in the economy). In other words, each project wants to streamline how huge sums of money move across borders or between people.

• Real-Time Value Transfer: A core innovation of both is instant settlement via blockchain. Ripple’s XRP Ledger enables near-instant cross-border currency exchange and remittance settlement (no waiting days for bank wires). Similarly, Zebec’s protocol streams payments by the second, so value moves continuously rather than in batch pay cycles. This real-time, always-on flow of funds is a fundamental shift from traditional delays.

• Bridging TradFi and Crypto: Both projects actively build bridges to traditional finance (TradFi). Ripple has long worked with banks, integrating XRP as a bridge asset in systems like RippleNet and aligning with global standards (it was the first crypto company on the ISO 20022 standards body thecryptobasic.com). Zebec, for its part, is integrating with existing payroll providers and financial infrastructure. For example, Zebec’s platform supports stablecoins (like USDC) for salaries and ties into payroll software and even debit cards, blending Web3 tech with everyday finance. In short, neither is a pure “crypto for crypto’s sake” project – they both seek real-world use by interfacing with legacy systems and compliance frameworks.

• Ambition to Disrupt Financial Infrastructure: Underlying both XRP and ZBCN is a bold ambition to upgrade the pipes of global finance. XRP tackles the correspondent banking network (SWIFT, etc.), aiming to make moving money across currencies as efficient as sending an email. Zebec targets the way people get paid and transact continuously, envisioning streaming money as a norm. In both cases, blockchain is the enabling technology to remove friction from huge, established processes (bank settlements and payroll, respectively).

Differences

For all their common goals, XRP and ZBCN diverge in focus, structure, and approach:

• Use Case Focus – B2B (Business-to-Business) vs B2C (Business-to-Consumer): XRP’s primary role is as a liquidity bridge for banks and financial institutions. Ripple’s solution (often via On-Demand Liquidity) uses XRP to settle interbank transfers and remittances, essentially a B2B backend service. In contrast, Zebec is a real-time payment streaming protocol for payroll and consumer finance – more of a B2C (and DAO) oriented application. ZBCN powers things like employees getting paid in real time, DAO treasuries streaming funds, or creators receiving continuous income. This means XRP lives mostly behind the scenes in bank software, whereas Zebec’s tech is experienced directly by end-users (e.g. workers, freelancers, DAO members).

• Centralized Company vs DAO: The projects differ in governance. XRP is inherently decentralized as a cryptocurrency, but its ecosystem is strongly driven by a private company, Ripple Labs. Ripple Labs (and its partners) operate a significant portion of XRP Ledger validators and steer much of the network’s development. Zebec, on the other hand, touts a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) structure where ZBCN token holders vote on decisions, and the protocol is meant to be community-governed. The Zebec team (led by founder Sam Thapaliya) certainly drives development now, but the intent is a decentralized governance over time. This difference is reflected in culture too: XRP’s direction often depends on Ripple’s enterprise strategy, while Zebec’s path is influenced by a mix of its community, partners, and DAO proposals.

• Regulatory Journeys: Regulation has played out differently. Ripple’s XRP has been at the center of one of crypto’s most famous legal battles – the SEC’s lawsuit alleging XRP was an unregistered security. After years of uncertainty, Ripple scored a partial legal victory in 2023 (with a judge ruling programmatic sales of XRP were not securities reuters.com), but the saga showed Ripple’s reactive stance: fight it out in court. Zebec has entered compliance-friendly markets early (for example, launching services in Japan’s regulated digital finance sandbox businesswire.com) and even acquired traditional financial entities to smoothly integrate. In 2025, Zebec acquired PayBridge, a U.S. payroll company, to enhance its on-chain payroll offerings ainvest.com. PayBridge processes over $300 million in annual payroll volume zebec.io, and bringing it under Zebec’s wing not only adds real users but also helps navigate payroll licensing and compliance. This approach – working within regulatory frameworks (sandboxes, acquisitions, audits) – contrasts with Ripple’s more adversarial battle with regulators.

• Technology and Ecosystem: XRP runs on the XRP Ledger, a purpose-built network optimized for payments, with a unique consensus mechanism (no mining, low fees). It’s highly efficient for simple transfers but somewhat limited in smart contract capability (though sidechains and hooks are being developed). Zebec launched originally on Solana (leveraging Solana’s speed for streaming payments) and is now expanding multi-chain, including its own Nautilus Chain for optimized payment streaming businesswire.com. Zebec’s ecosystem includes dApps like its Payroll app, WageLink (a compliant payroll app bridging stablecoins and traditional systemszebec.io), and a debit card program. In essence, XRP is more a single token with a specific network, whereas Zebec is building a broader platform (multi-chain support, apps, card, etc.) around the ZBCN token.

🎥 New Video Out Now: XRP vs ZBCN

We just released a new video on my Martyn Lucas Investor YouTube channel covering the key points around XRP vs Zebec Network (ZBCN) — including partnerships, market potential, and what could happen this cycle.

ZBCN Spotlight: Payroll Streaming in Action

To appreciate Zebec’s real-world impact, consider its flagship use case: streaming payroll. Traditionally, employees get paychecks bi-weekly or monthly, and contractors might wait weeks for invoices to clear. Zebec flips that model by enabling employers to pay by the second. Through Zebec’s smart contracts, an employee’s salary can stream continuously into their crypto wallet – every moment they’re on the clock, they are literally earning money in real time medium.commedium.com. For example, a freelance developer could start a gig on Monday and by lunchtime Tuesday have the equivalent of a day’s pay already accessible in their wallet, without waiting till month-end.

This streaming salary concept isn’t just theoretical – it’s live and growing. Over 600 companies (partners and paying clients) have used Zebec’s payroll system, reaching more than 355,000 unique users as of 2025 zebec.io. These aren’t small numbers for a young project; it signals genuine traction. Zebec’s users include crypto startups (who prefer paying teams in stablecoin), DAOs distributing grants, and even traditional businesses experimenting with stablecoin wages. In total, the Zebec network has handled over $300M in payroll volume via its acquisitions and platform zebec.io, demonstrating that meaningful sums are already streaming on-chain.

Why would anyone want a salary stream? The benefits differ for various stakeholders:

• Workers (Especially Gig Workers): For employees and contractors, streamed pay means instant liquidity and flexibility. No more living paycheck to paycheck or resorting to payday loans – you have access to the money you’ve earned immediately. It leverages the time value of money: a dollar earned today can be used or invested today, rather than sitting idle for weeks. Gig workers can finish a task and literally get paid that same hour in USDC. This is life-changing for those who need cash flow for daily expenses or want to put earnings to work right away (e.g. into savings or DeFi yields).

• Employers & Treasuries: Companies using Zebec gain efficiency and potentially better employee retention. Payroll administration becomes simpler – by automating streams, there’s less manual processing and scheduling of batch payments medium.com. It’s also a perk for attracting talent: offering real-time pay can differentiate an employer in competitive job markets For treasury managers (or DAO treasuries), streaming can improve budget control; funds are disbursed gradually rather than as large up-front lumps, which helps manage cash flow. In a DAO context, for example, streaming a grant over 6 months ensures accountability – the recipient gets funds continuously only while delivering, and the DAO can halt the stream if needed. Additionally, since Zebec is tax-compliant and integrates with accounting tools, it can simplify compliance in paying out crypto salaries medium.com.

• DeFi Integration (Yield & More): Because the payments are on-chain, workers or receivers can directly connect them to other crypto services. This opens up creative “money Lego” possibilities: someone could have a portion of their paycheck streaming into a savings vault or yield farm automatically. Zebec’s ecosystem includes Zebec Vaults and integrations that allow streaming funds to flow into investments or interest-bearing accounts seamlessly. Essentially, you could be earning yield on your income as you earn it, without waiting for a month-end lump sum. This kind of automated dollar-cost-averaging or yield routing from each paycheck is new territory that Zebec is exploring. It’s not just salaries – Zebec streams can be used for subscriptions, vesting token distributions, and other scenarios where chunking payments into per-second increments makes sense medium.com.

In short, Zebec’s real-time payroll turns income into a continuous, programmable financial stream, with tangible benefits for all parties involved. It’s a compelling example of crypto enabling something not feasible in legacy finance.

Market Size Comparison

Both XRP and ZBCN are vying for slices of enormous markets – but the nature and scale of those markets differ:

• Ripple’s Playing Field: XRP is targeting the cross-border payments and forex settlement arena. Global remittances alone (money sent by migrant workers to their home countries) reached about $794 billion in 2022 weforum.org and continue to grow. Add to that the multi-trillion daily foreign exchange market (much of which involves cross-currency transfers that could be streamlined by XRP as a bridge asset). Ripple’s focus is often cited as the ~$800B/year remittance+FX niche, but ultimately it’s any international value transfer. This includes not just person-to-person remittances, but also bank-to-bank settlements, corporate treasury flows, and potentially even central bank digital currency exchanges.

• Zebec’s Playing Field: Zebec is aiming at much broader swathes of the economy’s payment flows. Start with global payroll: all the salaries and contractor payments worldwide likely exceed trillions per year. Zebec’s vision is to capture a fraction of that by offering a better payroll rail. But it doesn’t stop at payroll – Zebec’s streaming technology can apply to decentralized finance (DeFi) streams, subscriptions, and even machine-to-machine payments. For example, Zebec’s partnership with IoTeX hints at streaming payments in IoT and decentralized physical infrastructure networks linkedin.com – think of autonomous machines paying each other for services in real time. Moreover, Zebec is tapping into DePIN (decentralized physical networks) and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs): its SwissCheese integration lets people spend tokenized stocks via Zebec’s cardlinkedin.com, effectively bridging stock market value into everyday payments. Each of those niches (IoT payments, RWA transactions, subscription economy, etc.) are multi-trillion-dollar realms on their own. Thus, the scope of money streams ZBCN targets could be tens of trillions annually, dwarfing most single crypto niches. Of course, Zebec capturing even a small percentage of that would be a huge success – but the vision is truly expansive.

To summarize: Ripple aims to be the backbone for cross-border money transfers, while Zebec targets becoming the backbone for continuous payments across many domains (potentially trillions per year). Both are addressing enormous markets that, if cracked, could drive massive demand for their tokens and networks.

Partnerships

Another lens to compare XRP and ZBCN is through their partners and allies, which reveal their strategies and credibility in the industry:

• Ripple (XRP) Partnerships: Ripple has spent years cultivating relationships with banks, payment providers, and even governments. Over 300 financial institutions across 40+ countries have partnered with Ripple to use its technology zycrypto.com. This roster includes major names like Santander, American Express, SBI Holdings, Standard Chartered, and many regional banks and remittance companies. These partnerships often leverage RippleNet or ODL (On-Demand Liquidity), where XRP serves as the bridge currency for cross-border flows. Ripple’s integration into the banking world is further evidenced by its involvement in setting global standards – it joined the ISO 20022 standards committee in 2020 thecryptobasic.com, aligning XRP’s messaging with the format that banks are adopting for payments. Ripple is also known to work with several central banks on CBDC (central bank digital currency) pilots. In short, Ripple’s partnerships are heavily institutional and aimed at making XRP part of the international financial infrastructure. Recently, Ripple even announced a major acquisition of a prime brokerage firm (Hidden Road) to deepen its ties in traditional finance, signaling that its strategy is to integrate crypto with the existing financial system at the highest levels.

• Zebec (ZBCN) Partnerships: Zebec’s partnerships straddle both crypto and TradFi, underscoring its hybrid approach. On the crypto side, Zebec has aligned with stablecoin issuers and blockchain networks: it’s part of Circle’s Alliance Program to promote USDC for real-world payments (Circle is even taking a stake by holding ZBCN tokens as part of that deal 99bitcoins.com), and Zebec has worked with Stellar alongside Circle to pilot stablecoin payroll in new markets businesswire.com. . On the TradFi side, Zebec launched a Mastercard-supported debit card (the Zebec Card) that lets users spend crypto as easily as fiat. This card partnership means thousands of merchants globally can accept funds from a Zebec wallet, with Mastercard handling the conversion. Zebec’s forward-looking alliances include working with IoTeX for IoT payments and SwissCheese Finance to make tokenized stocks spendable via Zebec’s cardlinkedin.com – bridging crypto with both physical devices and traditional assets. And intriguingly, as noted earlier, Zebec is now in talks with Ripple itself. While details are scarce, the very fact that Ripple’s team is exploring collaboration suggests potential synergies (perhaps combining Ripple’s liquidity network with Zebec’s streaming tech). Overall, Zebec’s partnerships show a strategy of embedding into existing systems (payment cards, payroll providers) and collaborating with established crypto infrastructure (stablecoins, oracles, IoT networks) to accelerate adoption.

Both projects also engage with standard-setting and fintech communities. These partnerships and alliances give confidence that XRP and ZBCN aren’t operating in isolation but are building ecosystems around their core use cases.

Tokenomics & Community

Digging into token fundamentals and community profiles highlights more differences and a few similarities:

• Supply and Emission: XRP and ZBCN both have large token supplies, but their distribution trajectories differ. XRP was created with a fixed supply of 100 billion XRP. Ripple periodically sells or uses portions of escrowed XRP to fund operations and ecosystem growth, meaning there is a slow emission of new supply into the market. XRP has a tiny built-in deflationary mechanism: every transaction burns a small fraction of XRP as a fee, which over many years has burned millions of XRP, though out of 100B this burn rate is negligible in the near term. ZBCN, by comparison, is also a high-supply token – sources indicate a max supply of 100 billion tokens (after a recent re-denomination and chain launch). However, its circulating supply is still evolving; earlier on Solana it had a smaller circulation (a few billion), and as it transitioned to its own chain, a larger supply is coming into play. The Zebec team holds allocations, and tokens are allocated for rewards, ecosystem grants, etc., implying a planned emission over time to support growth. In short, both tokens are not scarce in the sense of Bitcoin – they’re meant to facilitate high-volume usage – but XRP’s supply curve is largely set (with most already created), whereas ZBCN is in a more active distribution phase to bootstrap the network.

• Staking and Utility: XRP operates on a consensus protocol (Unique Node List validators) and does not use staking; there’s no native yield for holding XRP aside from potential network fee burns and price appreciation. Its utility is mainly as a bridge currency for payments and a liquidity token banks/market-makers hold to settle transactions. ZBCN, on the other hand, is explicitly a utility and governance token within Zebec’s ecosystem 99bitcoins.com. Holders can stake ZBCN to participate in governance votes and to earn rewards. In fact, Zebec has offered attractive staking yields (reported up to ~25% APY in some programs) to incentivize long-term participation. Beyond governance, ZBCN may be used to pay protocol fees or as gas on Zebec’s chain, and it likely will have a role in accessing premium features (for example, businesses might need to hold some ZBCN to use certain Zebec services at scale). This means ZBCN’s tokenomics are more complex, blending incentives for DeFi users with traditional token utility, whereas XRP’s role is more straightforward as a medium of exchange within Ripple’s network (and a speculative asset for many holders).

• Governance Approach: As mentioned, Zebec leans into DAO governance – ZBCN token holders can vote on proposals, from protocol upgrades to treasury spend. This community governance model gives ZBCN holders a voice (even if in practice the core team still leads development for now). XRP’s governance is more off-chain and corporate; changes to the XRP Ledger require supermajority agreement of validator nodes. XRP holders at large do not have a say in protocol decisions – it’s not a governance token. This marks a philosophic difference: Zebec is fostering a decentralized decision-making culture, whereas XRP’s evolution has been steered by a company aligning with regulators and institutions.

• Community & Culture: XRP’s community (“XRP Army”) is one of the largest and most passionate in crypto. They’ve weathered bear markets and the SEC lawsuit with unwavering faith, often touting XRP’s potential to revolutionize banking. It’s a predominantly retail investor base, including many early adopters from 2013-2017 who still hold XRP today. This community is known for its loyalty and also for actively promoting XRP integrations (and sometimes conspiracy-like enthusiasm about XRP ruling finance). In contrast, Zebec’s community is nascent and more niche, but the XRP Army are rallying behind it. It started with Solana DeFi users and developers interested in payments. As Zebec expanded, its community now includes builders (developers integrating streams into their apps), DeFi enthusiasts, and early retail investors drawn by Zebec’s real-world traction. There’s also a slice of users who are not typical crypto folks – e.g. employees getting paid via Zebec might be part of the community simply by using the product. The culture around ZBCN is pragmatic and builder-focused (“let’s solve payroll”), with a dash of opportunism (some see ZBCN as an under-the-radar gem). It lacks the sheer scale and social media presence of XRP’s army, but if Zebec’s recent mention alongside Ripple is any indication, the community could grow. Notably, Zebec’s community, while smaller, benefits from the project’s partnerships – e.g. Circle or Visa’s involvement brings credibility that enthuses community members.

• One difference is Zebec is making efforts to spread tokens via usage (e.g. rewarding users, liquidity mining, etc.), trying to cultivate a wide base of token holders who actually use the protocol, not just VC holders. Time will tell how decentralized ZBCN’s token distribution becomes versus XRP’s more fixed (if uneven) distribution.

📈 Price Predictions