The claim
In January 2025, a financial advisor named David Stryzewski went on Fox Business. Stryzewski is the chief executive of an advisory firm called Sound Planning Group. He is not a Bank of America executive. He is not a Ripple employee. On air, he made two claims that lit up the cryptocurrency world for the next year. The first was that Bank of America holds eighty-three patents related to Ripple. The second was that Bank of America conducts one hundred percent of its internal transactions using XRP.
Both claims raced across the internet. Dozens of outlets repeated them. It was exactly the story a certain kind of reader wanted to be true.
It is not true. And the honest version is more useful than the myth.
What the filing says
On March 26, 2018, Bank of America filed a patent application. Application number 15/935,941. Its title: "Real-time net settlement by distributed ledger system." Buried inside it is Figure 6, a diagram of banks moving money to one another through a shared ledger. The exact words, copied here as they appear in the filing, are these:
"a prefunded 'ripple' settlement scheme according to embodiments of the present invention."
Lowercase. In quotation marks. Sitting inside a Bank of America patent application like a fingerprint someone forgot to wipe.
Where it stops
There is no portfolio of eighty-three Bank of America patents that reference Ripple. When you go looking for the filings that actually contain the word "ripple," you do not find dozens. You find one invention: the 2018 application, plus a follow-on continuation of the same invention by the same two inventors.
In the 2018 application, Figure 6 is the prefunded "ripple" scheme and Figure 7 is a "just-in-time" real-time settlement scheme. In the 2019 continuation, Figure 6 is the "just-in-time" scheme. The ripple diagram was cut, and everything behind it moved up a slot. The word appears nowhere in the later document.
That document was abandoned. Bank of America let it lapse. It was never granted. Neither was the continuation, which the bank also abandoned. First it dropped the diagram, then it dropped the invention.
Now the bigger claim. One hundred percent of internal transactions on XRP. There is no evidence for it. None. The application that started the whole story does not mention XRP even once.
What survives
A 2016 pilot Ripple confirmed on the record. A founding seat that same year on Ripple's payments steering group. A 2018 patent that borrows Ripple's name. A slide at an IMF seminar where Ripple called the bank a customer. A job posting in 2019 to staff the work. A partnership statement from a bank executive in 2020. A late-2025 toe in the water through a regulated fund.
None of them, alone or together, means Bank of America's plumbing runs on XRP today. All of them together mean something quieter and harder to dismiss: for a decade, the second-largest bank in the United States has kept a hand on this technology, in writing, through every phase of its own caution.
- The application
- US 2019/0172059 A1, application 15/935,941, filed March 26, 2018. Pull it at patents.google.com/patent/US20190172059A1 and read the entry for FIG. 6 in the Brief Description of the Drawings. Use the number. The title is generic enough that searching it will not reliably land you here.
- The continuation that dropped the word
- US 2019/0392437 A1. Search it for "ripple." It is not there.
- Where "83" came from
- A Fox Business segment, January 6, 2025. Both figures asserted on air, with no documentation offered. Bank of America has never confirmed either claim.
That is one bank, one claim, and three receipts. Chapter 3 tells the rest of the Bank of America story, and the book prints 169 receipts in all, listed by chapter, with instructions for pulling every one of them yourself.
