Crypto & DeFi Mostly accurate, with one big caveat

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-09-18 · 7 min read

This article is general information, not financial, tax, or investment advice. Income claims and platform fees change. Talk with a licensed professional before making financial decisions based on anything you read here.

XRP yield without staking: what Jake Claver’s video gets right — and what it skips

Verdict: Mostly accurate, with one big caveat. The technical explanations hold up; the danger is that the “yield” strategies he describes are the same ones that vaporized billions in customer funds.

Jake Claver’s video “How The Wealthy Will Use XRP Without Staking it” has pulled in more than 111,000 views by walking through a real technical fact: there is no native staking on the XRP Ledger. From there he lays out five ways to earn a return on XRP anyway — lending, liquidity pools, options, collateral, and structured products — and closes by pointing viewers to his firm, DAG Wealth. Is the pitch accurate? Mostly, yes. That’s what makes the caveat worth reading.

What the video actually claims

Claver’s central point is correct and, honestly, more responsible than most crypto content. XRP is not a proof-of-stake asset. You can’t lock it with a validator and receive freshly minted coins the way you can with Ethereum or Solana. So any platform advertising “XRP staking rewards” is, in his words, doing something else under the hood — and he tells you to ask what.

He then walks through the alternatives. You can lend your XRP and collect interest. You can supply it to an automated market maker (AMM) or liquidity pool and earn trading fees. You can sell options against a large position to generate premium. You can post XRP as collateral to borrow cash without selling. And you can bundle several of these into a “structured product” — which is exactly what he says his hedge fund does, posting XRP as collateral, drawing a line of credit against it, and trading that capital.

To his credit, he names the risks out loud: counterparty risk, rehypothecation, margin calls, and impermanent loss. He repeats a version of “understand where the yield comes from” throughout. This is not a “get rich with XRP” video. It’s closer to a finance lecture with a sales pitch stapled to the end.

What the method actually requires

Here’s the part the friendly tone can bury. Every strategy he lists has a body count.

Take lending. When you lend XRP for interest, someone else custodies it, and you become an unsecured creditor. That’s not a theoretical concern. In February 2022 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged BlockFi over its Interest Accounts — a product that let customers lend crypto for interest of up to around 9% — and BlockFi agreed to pay $100 million in penalties, split between the SEC and 32 states, and register the product as a security. BlockFi later filed for bankruptcy. Celsius, which ran the same “earn yield on your crypto” model, collapsed in 2022 owing customers billions; its founder Alex Mashinsky was sentenced to 12 years in prison in May 2025 after pleading guilty to fraud. The interest was real right up until the principal wasn’t.

The AMM route is real too — and Claver is right that it’s native to the XRP Ledger. The XLS-30 amendment went live on the XRPL mainnet in March 2024, so you genuinely can provide liquidity and earn fees today. But he glosses fast over the cost. To supply a two-sided pool you have to sell half your XRP for the other asset (USDC or RLUSD), which means if XRP rips upward you suffer impermanent loss — you end up with less XRP than if you’d simply held. Single-sided exposure, as he admits, can “lose your shirt” too.

Then there are the options strategies, which he frames as what founders with concentrated stock use. That’s accurate. A collar — selling a call and buying a put — does generate premium. What he underweights is the trade-off that even regulated funds are required to spell out: writing calls caps your upside at the strike price while you keep bearing the downside. For an asset whose entire retail appeal is “it could 10x,” selling away the 10x to collect a few percent is a bigger concession than a 90-second segment implies.

Who actually wins this game?

Notice who each of these strategies was built for. Collars and structured products are the tools of “a founder in Microsoft early on,” in his own example — someone sitting on a nine-figure position who wants cash flow without triggering capital gains. That’s not the median viewer of a YouTube crypto video.

The people who reliably profit from the “XRP as a productive asset” model are the ones running the products: the lenders who set the spread, the prime brokers who charge on the credit line, and the fund managers (like DAG Wealth) who collect fees for assembling the structure. Borrowing against your XRP, as Claver correctly notes, “isn’t yield” — you owe interest on a real note. The only way it makes money is if you redeploy the borrowed cash into something that beats the loan cost. That’s leverage, and leverage is precisely what turns a 40% XRP drawdown into a margin call and a forced sale at the bottom.

What you’d realistically earn

Set the number honestly. XRPL AMM fees for a liquidity provider are a fraction of a percent skimmed from trading volume, and they only matter at scale — a few hundred dollars of XRP in a pool earns pennies while carrying impermanent-loss risk. Lending desks advertising XRP yield have historically paid in the low-to-mid single digits, and that “yield” is a claim against a counterparty that may not survive a bad quarter.

The video never promises a specific figure, which is fair. But a viewer should not walk away thinking there’s a safe 8% waiting for their XRP. The realistic ceiling for a retail holder is a low single-digit return that can be wiped out — principal and all — by a single custodian failure or a sharp price move against a leveraged position. The wealthy families he references aren’t chasing yield; they’re managing tax and liquidity on assets they can afford to have locked up for years.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

This approach fits a narrow profile: someone with a large XRP position (think six figures and up) they don’t want to sell for tax reasons, real risk tolerance, and access to a professional who can structure and monitor the position. If that’s you, the video is a reasonable primer on the vocabulary — and you should absolutely talk to a licensed advisor, as Claver himself says.

It is not for the person with a few thousand dollars of XRP looking for passive income. For that reader, “lend it out for yield” is the exact pitch that ended in bankruptcy court twice in one cycle. The safer questions remain the boring ones about custody and counterparty — the same discipline that applies to any income stream you’re trying to build or any long-horizon investment that’s supposed to pay you for years.

What to remember

Claver gets the mechanics right, and he’s more upfront about risk than the genre norm. The caveat is that “productive XRP” and “yield on XRP” describe institutional finance dressed for a retail audience — and the retail versions of these exact strategies are the ones that left customers as creditors in bankruptcy. Where does the yield come from, who holds the asset, and what happens if the price halves? Ask those before anyone quotes you an APY.