XRP (XRP) Would Need $24.50 to Flip Bitcoin, Says Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz

Schwartz Sees a Growth-Led Flippening

David Schwartz, Ripple's chief technology officer emeritus and one of the original architects of the XRP Ledger, said this week that XRP (XRP) could one day overtake Bitcoin by market capitalization. During a recent X Spaces discussion, Schwartz was asked point-blank whether a “flippening” — the displacement of one leading asset by another atop the market-cap rankings — was genuinely possible. His answer was yes, though attached to a decisive caveat: the rotation would not come from Bitcoin shrinking, but from XRP compounding at a faster pace while the wider sector expands.

Schwartz grounded the argument in engineering rather than price talk. The blockchain underpinning XRP was designed from inception as a faster and more scalable payments network than Bitcoin, delivering higher transaction throughput and functionality that Bitcoin's base layer cannot accommodate. Its reliance on independent validating nodes rather than energy-intensive mining sits at the core of that throughput case. In Schwartz's view, these properties position the ledger to attract users and capital seeking capabilities beyond simple store-of-value transfers — a structural edge in any race for valuation share against Bitcoin's market dominance.

He also framed the scenario inside a much larger total market. In a future where the digital-asset sector expands dramatically, leading assets could all appreciate together instead of competing for a fixed pool of capital. Schwartz said the mechanism is XRP “growing faster than Bitcoin,” not any collapse at the top — a distinction he stressed repeatedly. Notably, he stopped short of calling the outcome inevitable or imminent, presenting it as a conditional possibility rooted in relative technical strengths. Schwartz spent more than a decade as Ripple's lead technical voice before moving into his emeritus role, and few figures carry comparable standing on questions of ledger design — which is precisely why the remarks energized segments of the XRP community within hours.

The $24.50 Math Behind a Flip

Whatever the technological case, the arithmetic remains daunting. On September 10, Bitcoin changed hands near $77,165 with a market capitalization of roughly $1.54 trillion, while XRP traded close to $1.35 at a valuation near $85 billion — leaving the market leader approximately 18 times larger. Assuming Bitcoin's cap holds steady and using XRP's circulating supply of about 62.7 billion tokens, matching that valuation would require XRP near $24.50, an appreciation of more than seventeen-fold. Every further dollar of Bitcoin growth pushes the target higher, as the year-to-date market-cap comparison makes clear. Schwartz offered no timeline, and the calculation assumes no change in supply or in Bitcoin's own trajectory.

History shows XRP has closed enormous gaps before. In late 2017 and early 2018, the token briefly became the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, overtaking Ethereum and narrowing the distance to Bitcoin during that cycle's peak. Schwartz himself has recalled selling some XRP near $0.10 because the price already felt extraordinarily high against earlier levels around $0.006 — the same way $100 Bitcoin once looked absurd. His broader point: participants systematically underestimate how large top assets can become in a genuine expansion phase.

The remarks land while XRP's institutional narrative is already running hot. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has separately projected a $10 trillion market cap for XRP within 10 to 15 years, and the token recently slipped to $1.36 ahead of the Senate CLARITY Act vote. The tone from Ripple's leadership is consistent with the broader XRP market narrative: a multi-trillion-dollar future framed as a growth story rather than a zero-sum rotation. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

A Conditional 18x Path

For our part, we read Schwartz's comments as a deliberate framing exercise: the primary record — his own remarks during the X Spaces session — conditions the entire scenario on relative growth, never on Bitcoin's decline. That distinction matters. An 18x repricing against a static Bitcoin cap would demand years of sustained capital inflow and adoption well beyond anything in the current trend, and headlines of this kind have historically marked moments when eager buyers become exit liquidity. Spot markets showed little conviction on the day: XRP's spot price slipped 4.0% over the past 24 hours. The flip thesis remains a long-horizon possibility, not a near-term setup.