XRP’s Price: Essential as a Spoon in a Sausage Factory

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XRP is currently trading at $1.39, which is like finding a £5 note in a £100 bill – if the £100 bill was made of lead and you were wearing socks. And while most holders are staring at the price waiting for a recovery, they may be missing the more important question: does XRP even work if the price stays low? Probably not. It’s like trying to drive a car with the gas tank full of glitter.

According to Ripple’s own CTO, the answer is no. Which, if you’re a bank, is the equivalent of saying “Yes, we need a spaceship to get to Mars, but only if it’s painted pink.”

David Schwartz Said It Eight Years Ago

In a post on Kora that went viral at the time, Ripple CTO David Schwartz laid out the logic plainly. It was so clear, even a parrot could understand it. Or a parrot with a PhD in economics.

As highlighted recently by crypto analyst Levi, Schwartz wrote: “The price of XRP you need to make a $1 million payment will always be at least $1 million. Higher prices tend to correlate with higher liquidity, which means cheaper payments.”

The argument is not complicated. If a bank needs to move a billion dollars and XRP is trading at five cents, buying that much XRP would move the price dramatically mid-transaction – creating slippage that makes the whole thing impractical. It’s like trying to pour a bathtub with a teaspoon. A very expensive teaspoon.

A higher market cap means the same transaction barely moves the needle. Banks don’t just tolerate a high XRP price. They require it. Which is like saying “We need a firewall, but it must be made of cotton candy.”

The $33 Trillion Target

Ripple’s recent moves make more sense through this lens. The team has been expanding RLUSD, its stablecoin, on the XRP Ledger, with a stated target of the $33 trillion stablecoin market. Which is like trying to sell a million rubber ducks in a world that’s already drowning in them.

The stablecoin removes slippage concerns for banks while still keeping XRP at the centre of every transaction. It’s like using a spoon to eat soup, but the spoon is also a spaceship.

The strategy, Schwartz outlined years ago, starts with smaller currency corridors – markets like Euro to INR where margins are thin and inefficiencies are high – before moving up to the major currencies that move trillions daily. It’s the crypto equivalent of starting with a pebble and ending up with a mountain. Or a very large pebble.

The Structural Pieces Are Now Real

What’s changed since Schwartz first made this argument is that the infrastructure is actually being built. Ripple received conditional approval for a national trust bank charter from the OCC in December 2025. Mastercard added Ripple to its 85-company global Crypto Partner Program on March 11, alongside Binance, PayPal, Circle and Gemini. It’s like getting a gold star for doing the right thing, but only if you’ve already done the wrong thing for a decade.

Ripple also launched a $750 million share buyback in March, valuing the company at $50 billion – a 25% increase from its November funding round. The company is pricing its equity higher while the token trades near lows. That gap says something about where Ripple’s leadership thinks this is heading. Which is probably somewhere between “optimistic” and “completely nuts.”

Crypto Sensei also flagged on-chain data showing XRP’s multi-exchange withdrawal delta has fallen to an all-time low – meaning more investors are moving XRP off exchanges, historically a bullish signal for long-term holders. Which is like saying the Titanic is heading towards an iceberg, but it’s a very stylish iceberg.

The Schwartz argument was always logical. The question was whether the real-world pieces would fall into place. In 2026, they are starting to. Which, if you believe in the power of logic, is a miracle. If you don’t, it’s just another day in the universe of crypto.

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2026-03-14 14:06