XRP could one day become a $100 trillion asset, with the driver, according to market commentator xrpl_Adam, being institutional demand for the Ripple token as locked collateral.

His argument pushed back against one of the most common claims in the XRP community: that large payment flows alone could justify extremely high valuations.

Instead, he says investors should watch whether major financial firms start accepting XRP as collateral, calling that the only development that would create a structural reason for institutions to hold large amounts of the token and potentially push its price to $100 or even $1,000.

Idle Supply, Not Payment Volume, Is the Key Argument

In a July 29 thread on X, xrpl_Adam started by dismissing the often-cited comparison that because SWIFT moves roughly $5 trillion a day, XRP needs a similar valuation to matter as a bridge currency.

According to him, a bridge asset that settles in three to five seconds gets reused constantly, so turning it over 100 times means $5 trillion in daily flows only needs around $50 billion of float.

“Volume doesn’t set the price. Idle inventory does,” the analyst said.

Using XRP’s supply figure, he noted that there are about 100 billion of them in existence, with 32.4 billion held in escrow, leaving close to 62 billion tokens able to move, a figure that lines up with the 62.533 billion circulating supply cited on the CoinGecko website.

Based on that supply, if XRP were to go to $100, it would imply a market cap of about $10 trillion, while a $1,000 price would value the network at around $100 trillion.

The only force xrpl_Adam sees capable of creating the kind of long-term demand that would push XRP’s value to such levels is collateral, where the asset is pledged against trades and stays locked for the duration of those positions instead of circulating through the market. He compared this with gold, arguing that its worth comes from being held, not from being constantly transacted.

As evidence that Ripple may be moving in that direction, the market watcher pointed to Ripple’s $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road, now renamed to Ripple Prime, a prime broker that decides what counts as acceptable collateral. KBRA, an SEC-registered rating agency, gave it a BBB issuer rating on April 2 and a BBB senior debt rating on July 8.

But he flagged what is missing. Neither Ripple’s published collateral schedule nor KBRA’s reports currently list XRP as eligible collateral. Furthermore, while CEO Brad Garlinghouse spoke in May about making XRP acceptable collateral, it was only as a future goal.

XRP Price Under Pressure Despite Ecosystem Progress

Ripple has been making moves recently, including launching Ripple Mint to simplify RLUSD stablecoin management for institutional clients as well as investing in compliance provider Notabene to widen RLUSD’s reach among regulated payment firms.

However, XRP has barely reflected any of those developments in its performance, with CoinGecko data showing the asset trading around $1.09, a 2% increase in 24 hours but a 5% drop over seven days, having failed to hold gains above $1.16 earlier in the week. It is also more than 70% below its July 2025 all-time high of $3.65.

Source: CryptoPotato