The long-running debate over XRP’s market value ignores the real question, according to Digital Ascension Group CEO Jake Claver: Can the network accommodate institutional-level payment flows without inflating implementation costs? In a March 26 video, Claver argued that market cap is a poor measure of the functional strength of digital assets, and said the price of XRP would need to rise materially if it was to support bank-wide settlement.
Clavier framed The issue is over what he called the “Liquidity Index,” a model he says is designed to measure “the true utility and stability of digital assets” rather than just their fundamental valuation. His framework combines six variables: market depth, liquidity continuity, slippage, available supply, settlement speed, and reach. When these factors are evaluated together, he said, the key requirement for a payments asset is not speculative upside, but rather a price high enough to make large transactions executable.
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“The assets that will support the next financial system cannot be just volatile speculation,” Claver said. “It actually requires a high and stable price to be able to operate on a global scale.”
Why would XRP need a much higher price?
His argument begins with exposition. Claver compared XRP to a rare coin, saying that the relevant number is not just the total issuance, but the number of tokens actually available for trading. If demand rises while more supply is effectively reserved, the remaining float becomes more valuable. He linked this directly to the thesis of XRP payments, describing it as “fixed supply, increasing demand,” with the reduced quantity remaining in the market to do more pricing work.
From there, Claver turned to market depth, which he viewed as the foundation Centralized restriction for institutional use. He likened XRP’s liquidity to a pool of water that must be deep enough to accommodate large arrivals without chaos. He said that if a bank wanted to move $100 million cross-border using XRP, the shallow market would not absorb the flow cleanly and price misalignment would follow.
“Price should be the deciding factor,” he said. “If your XRP is worth $1 and you need to move $100 million into the network, you need a hundred million tokens sitting in the pool ready to be able to accommodate that trade. But as the size of the pool increases and let’s say the XRP is worth $100 each, you only need a million tokens to accommodate that same $100 million trade.”
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This logic extends to slippage, which Claver described as one of the clearest reasons why banks are not yet using cryptocurrency trails for large-value transfers. He said a $100 million XRP transaction today could lose “only about 10% due to slippage,” or roughly $10 million, while traditional stock markets could handle a similar volume for less than half a percent. To narrow this gap, the value on the order books would need to grow by about 20 to 100 times, he said. With the token supply fixed, the price has to “do all the work,” he said.
Claver also argued that the supply of available XRP could dwindle further over time. He pointed out ETF productsand treasury stocks of companies, banks, and DeFi groups as sources of locked tokens that will not be available for exchange liquidity. In this situation, he said, the increasing demand will collide with the shrinking float, and the price will not “gradually slide” but will see a higher gap once sellers become scarce.
Speed is another pillar of the thesis. XRP’s 3- to 5-second settlement time gives the same pool of capital a much greater turnover than slower networks, allowing market makers to recycle liquidity more efficiently, Claver said. But he stressed that speed alone is not enough. “If each trade costs you 1 to 2 percent slippage, the speed advantage turns into a faster way to lose money,” he said.
He concluded by saying that market cap only provides a superficial glimpse because it assumes that each token can be valued at its last trading price. For a network aiming to process cross-border value at scale, the real test is whether its order books can absorb it, he said. Institutional size Without destroying capital. According to Claver, this makes XRP’s price rise less of a hype than a structural requirement for the network to do the job its advocates envision.
At press time, XRP was trading at $1.3337.
Featured image created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
