A new analysis lays out what it would take for XRP to function as a settlement asset at the scale of major clearinghouses like the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS). The answer: a price of roughly $589 per token — more than 400 times today’s level.
The settlement scenario
The model assumes the XRP Ledger becomes part of delivery-versus-payment (DVP) settlement at the DTCC/CLS layer, handling about $73 trillion in annual transaction volume. That figure is broken into six corridors: DTCC net settlement ($15 trillion at 20% capture), SWIFT cross-border settlement ($21 trillion at 14% capture), FX derivatives net settlement ($12 trillion at 12% capture), repo and FICC atomic settlement ($5 trillion at 10% capture), nostro displacement ($9 trillion at 33% capture) and stablecoin settlement ($11 trillion at 33% capture). Individual transactions in this model range from $500 million to $10 billion per ticket.
How the model works
The square-root market impact model uses parameters including a $2 billion ticket size, 0.5% volatility, a 5-basis-point slippage tolerance, 1.36% daily turnover, and a liquid float of 25 billion XRP. Under those inputs, the required market capitalization hits about $14.7 trillion. Dividing that by the 25 billion liquid float yields the $589 target price.
Why the liquid float matters
The 25 billion figure used in the model is far smaller than XRP’s current circulating supply of roughly 61.82 billion tokens. The liquid float assumption excludes escrowed XRP, any XRP held in exchange-traded funds, treasury holdings, and tokens in wallets that haven’t moved in a long time. The difference between the two numbers means the model is pricing only the portion of supply that is actively tradeable — a point that could change if more tokens become liquid.
Where XRP stands today
At the time of writing, XRP trades near $1.37. That leaves a gap of more than 400 times to reach the hypothetical settlement price. The model doesn’t predict that XRP will hit $589 — it simply calculates what price would be needed to handle $73 trillion in annual DVP volume with limited price slippage. Whether the XRP Ledger ever achieves that kind of adoption at the DTCC/CLS layer remains an open question, and the gap between $1.37 and $589 underscores how far the token is from serving that role today.
