Ripple CTO: XRP Could Overtake Bitcoin by Market Cap on Adoption-Led Growth

According to CoinMarketCap, Ripple Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz said in a Twitter Spaces session this week that if XRP were ever to surpass Bitcoin in market capitalization, it would more likely come from XRP's own adoption and network growth rather than a sharp drop in Bitcoin's price. The remarks have rekindled debate over XRP's long-term valuation potential. A report citing calculations by crypto analyst Zach Rector estimates that if XRP's market cap rose to about $1.5 trillion—roughly in line with Bitcoin's current market value—and its circulating supply remained near 62 billion tokens, XRP would trade around $23.91 per token. If XRP matched Bitcoin's historical peak market cap of roughly $2.5 trillion, the implied price would be close to $40. Rector also presented a more conservative view using fully diluted valuation, based on XRP's total supply of 100 billion. Under that framework, a $1.5 trillion market cap implies an XRP price near $15, while $2.5 trillion implies about $25. He described the $15–$25 range as a conservative base case aligned with Schwartz's adoption-led growth logic, rather than an aggressive target. The report adds that Rector used Anthropic's Claude model to cross-check the scenario. The model suggested that if XRP were to genuinely overtake Bitcoin by market cap, the overall crypto market would likely be larger by then, potentially lifting Bitcoin's benchmark valuation as well. In that context, $15–$25 could represent a conservative lower bound rather than a ceiling. In a more optimistic scenario, Rector argues that if Bitcoin's market cap climbs to $3 trillion–$5 trillion and XRP expands alongside it, XRP could exceed $50 on a fully diluted basis. At the time of publication, XRP was trading around $1.30, below its cycle high of $3.66. Schwartz did not offer a timeline, and the discussion remains hypothetical. The article notes that Ripple's leadership has increasingly framed "market-cap outperformance through organic growth" as a plausible long-term outcome.