Dave Portnoy Drops Bombshell: ’Could XRP Pull a Bitcoin and Skyrocket?’

Barstool’s brash founder just tossed gasoline on the crypto rumor mill—asking if the much-maligned XRP could stage a Bitcoin-style moonshot. Never mind that Ripple’s still wrestling with the SEC or that ’utility token’ sounds suspiciously like ’corporate scrip.’

The real question? Whether Portnoy’s latest hot take is visionary... or just another distraction from his sportsbook’s liquidity ratios. Either way, the degens are listening.

Why XRP, Not Bitcoin

Portnoy’s self-diagnosed FOMO emerged in sharper relief as the conversation turned to real estate. He recalled smashing his fist on a desk after being outbid on a Miami apartment by “a crypto bro” who “heard about Bitcoin when it was, I don’t know, eight bucks, seven bucks.” The episode, he said, crystallised the anxiety of missing an asymmetric trade: “I’ve slaved for twenty years and he just out-bid me.”

That same impulse, Portnoy confessed, now drives his position in XRP. “It’s what—two bucks forty cents or something like that? What if that’s the next Bitcoin?” he said, emphasising that his allocation reflects a speculative itch rather than a thesis about Ripple’s technology or tokenomics. “It’s FOMO. It’s not like I have some grand belief in it.”

In perhaps the panel’s most revealing anecdote, Portnoy traced his fraught history with Bitcoin to a chance encounter: “I bought Bitcoin the first time for around $10,000 … the Winklevoss twins were staying next door to me at a hotel and they came and explained what Bitcoin was. It was the dumbest explanation I’d ever heard, and I sold it all right there.”

The forfeited position—“about $2 million”—would have dwarfed every other win in his career, he conceded, underscoring the emotional swing between conviction and capitulation that defines many retail journeys through crypto’s boom-and-bust cycles.

At press time, XRP traded at $2.40.