The inconvenient truth about XRP is that most people may be judging it through the wrong lens. This point of view was presented by commentator BarriC, who made a claim familiar among XRP enthusiasts: the altcoin was never intended for retail trading.
In a recent post on X he noted that assets was built to convey institutional value, and once the financial infrastructure actually requires XRP, the price will not rise slowly. Instead, it will re-price to the level of system requirements.
XRP as infrastructure, not trade
BarriC XRP price action predictions is based on the assumption that the purpose of XRP has been misunderstood. From its inception, the XRP Ledger structure was intended to facilitate rapid settlements, cross-border liquidity, and asset tokenization, where people can be their own bank and their transactions are not taxed by intermediaries. The creators of XRPL, such as David Schwartz, have always pointed to these functionalities as the reason why the XRP ledger is different.
XRP is a bridge asset within this XRPL ecosystem. Thanks to services built by Ripple, XRP has been positioned as a tool to provide on-demand liquidity between currencies and financial institutions. The reason given by BarriC is that banks and payment service providers rely on effective settlement of value, demand would be based on usage, not just speculative trading as with the average cryptocurrency.
Under this framework, XRP’s valuation would no longer be based on retail purchasing pressure. This would reflect how much capital is needed to flow through the network.
How high can the price actually be?
The most intriguing part of BarriC’s announcement is the extent to which necessity pricing will impact the token’s price. The prediction is that when the token finally becomes the required infrastructure, it will not grow higher and higher step by step like a meme-based rally. Instead, there will be a edged price reduction. Therefore, it rejects price anchors such as $2 or even the three-digit mark at $100.
If necessity pricing were to occur, price action would look more like $1,000 for XRP, $10,000 for XRP, or $50,000 for XRP. However, BarriC admitted that projections range from $1,000 to $50,000 sounds unrealistic in today’s conditions. This is especially true considering implied market capitalization if the altcoin were to trade at the predicted price levels.
At the time of writing, XRP is trading within normal market structures and is currently trading at $1.37, up 2.7% in the last 24 hours. Institutional operate of the altcoin is still restricted compared to global payment volumes. However, Ripple’s recent moves make XRP increasingly entrenched in the global payments niche.
It is currently unclear what path this price change will take, as there is no historical precedent in cryptocurrency markets for assets moving into a deeply entrenched global payment settlement infrastructure. Therefore BarriC forecasts and other bullish XRP supporters they are only forward-looking predictions.
Featured image from RenderHub, chart from Tradingview.com
