XRP’s long-running market cap debate misses the real question, according to Digital Ascension Group CEO Jake Claver: can the network absorb institutional-scale payment flows without blowing out execution costs? In a March 26 video, Claver argued that market cap is a poor measure of a digital asset’s functional strength and said XRP’s price would need to rise materially if it is ever to support bank-scale settlement.
“The assets that will power the next financial system can’t just be volatile speculation,” Claver said. “They actually require a high stable price in order to function at a global scale.”
Why XRP Could Need A Much Higher PriceHis argument starts with supply. Claver compared XRP to a scarce collectible, saying the relevant figure is not just total issuance but how many tokens are actually available to trade. If demand rises while more of the supply is effectively locked away, the remaining float becomes more valuable. He tied that directly to XRP’s payments thesis, describing it as “fixed supply, growing demand,” with the reduced amount left on the market doing more of the pricing work.
“The lever for that has got to be price,” he said. “If XRP is worth $1 each and you need to move $100 million to the network, you need a hundred million tokens sitting in the pool ready to be able to absorb that trade. But as the pool gets larger and let’s say XRP is worth $100 each, you only need a million tokens to absorb the same $100 million trade.”
That logic extended to slippage, which Claver described as one of the clearest reasons banks are not yet using crypto rails for large-value transfers. He said a $100 million XRP transaction today could lose “somewhere around 10% just because of slippage,” or roughly $10 million, while traditional equity markets can process similar size for less than half a percent. To narrow that gap, he argued, the value sitting on order books would need to grow by roughly 20 to 100 times. With token supply fixed, he said, price would have to do “all of that work.”
Speed is the other pillar of the thesis. Claver said XRP’s 3-to-5-second settlement time gives the same pool of capital far more turnover than slower networks, allowing market makers to recycle liquidity more efficiently. But he stressed that speed alone is not enough. “If every single trade cost you 1 to 2% in slippage,” he said, “the speed advantage turns into a faster way to lose money.”
At press time, XRP traded at $1.3337.
