Schwartz's Comments Spark Renewed Debate Over XRP's Potential to Overtake Bitcoin

Ripple's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) David Schwartz sparked renewed debate over XRP's potential to surpass Bitcoin in market capitalization. In a recent Twitter Spaces discussion, Schwartz stated that it's more likely for XRP to overtake Bitcoin through its own growth and adoption rather than a collapse in Bitcoin's price.

Crypto analyst Zach Rector analyzed the implications of this statement on XRP's price using both market cap and fully diluted valuation. He calculated that if Bitcoin's current market cap of $1.5 trillion were to reach $2.5 trillion, XRP would trade around $40. This estimate is based on XRP's current circulating supply of approximately 62 billion tokens.

However, taking a more conservative approach and accounting for XRP's full 100 billion token supply, Rector calculated fully diluted values of $15 at a $1.5 trillion valuation and $25 at $2.5 trillion. These figures represent the base case under Schwartz's own reasoning.

Rector also ran these scenarios through an AI tool called Claude to stress-test his conservative estimates. The AI pushed back that Rector's numbers understated the case, suggesting that $15 to $25 represents the floor of the scenario rather than a ceiling. In a more bullish case, if Bitcoin reaches a market cap of $3 trillion to $5 trillion and XRP scales alongside it, XRP could top $50 on a fully diluted basis.

XRP currently trades near $1.30, still below its cycle high of $3.66. Schwartz did not provide a timeline for any potential flip, and the scenario remains hypothetical. Nonetheless, his comments mark one of the clearest acknowledgments yet from Ripple's leadership that a Bitcoin flip through organic growth, rather than a collapse, is a plausible long-term outcome.