Cryptocurrencies are pretty mainstream nowadays, everybody and their grandfather want to be a crypto-millionaire. Very few have the skills to decide whether experimental technologies like Ripple or IOTA have a future[1], it's just speculation for speculation's sake. Ask the average Ripple owner what they think of the "trustlines" and the risks associated with it. Actually, just ask them what a Ripple trustline is. I doubt you'll get many answers.
[1] Honestly I feel pretty knowledgeable about how cryptocurrencies work and yet it's not rare for one of these whitepapers to lose me. For many of them you need a pretty good technical background on cryptography, game theory and economy (with maybe a hint of sociology) to really be able to gauge whether an idea has merit or not.
Except for the validation of transactions done through their distributed consensus protocol, which is done through validator nodes sitting across the world at places like MIT and Microsoft.