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.
Claver framed the case around what he called a “liquidity index,” a model he says is designed to measure “the true utility and stability of a digital asset” rather than just its headline valuation. His framework combines six variables: market depth, liquidity continuity, slippage, available supply, settlement speed, and access. When those factors are assessed together, he said, the key requirement for a payments asset is not speculative upside but a high enough price to make large transactions workable.
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“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 Price
His 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.
From there, Claver turned to market depth, which he cast as the central constraint for institutional use. He likened XRP liquidity to a pool of water that must be deep enough to absorb a large entrant without chaos. If a bank wanted to move $100 million across borders using XRP, he said, a shallow market would not absorb the flow cleanly and price dislocation would follow.
“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.”
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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.”
Claver also argued that available XRP supply could tighten further over time. He pointed to ETF products, corporate and bank treasury inventory, and DeFi pools as sources of locked-up tokens that would be unavailable for exchange liquidity. In that setup, he said, rising demand would collide with shrinking float and price would not “slide up gradually” but gap higher once sellers became scarce.
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.”
He closed by arguing that market cap offers only a superficial snapshot because it assumes every token could be valued at the last traded price. For a network meant to process cross-border value at scale, he said, the real test is whether its order books can absorb institutional volume without destroying capital. On Claver’s telling, that makes higher XRP prices less a matter of hype than a structural condition for the network to do the job its advocates envision.
At press time, XRP traded at $1.3337.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
