XRP News: David Schwartz Signals What Could Send XRP Higher Next

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Welcome back to Crypto with Natalia, where we break down what's really happening in crypto before the headlines catch up.

[00:00:06]If you want the signals, not the noise, you're in the right place.

[00:00:10]Here is a number I want you to sit with for a moment. 25 trillion dollars.

[00:00:15]That is just two payment systems, Fedwire and a single Ripple partner, moving value every single day. Not every year, every day.

[00:00:25]And XRP is being quietly wired into the infrastructure that handles that flow.

[00:00:29]Today, we are going to unpack exactly what that means, why the timeline is accelerating faster than most people realize, and what a Brazilian stablecoin, a Visa acquisition from 2009, and a blockchain interoperability layer called Axelar all have in common.

[00:00:45]Because on the surface, these look like separate stories. But pull back far enough, and they are all pieces of the same blueprint.

[00:00:53]Most people watching crypto right now are focused on price. They want to know when XRP hits $20, $50, $100. And look, I get it. That conversation is exciting.

[00:01:04]But here is the contrarian take. The price question is actually the least interesting thing happening right now.

[00:01:10]What is far more significant is the infrastructure being built underneath the price.

[00:01:14]The rails, the integrations, the institutional frameworks.

[00:01:18]Because when infrastructure reaches a tipping point, price does not gradually climb. It reprices, rapidly.

[00:01:26]And the evidence that we are approaching that tipping point is stacking up in ways that are hard to ignore.

[00:01:31]So, here's the plan for today.

[00:01:33]We are going to start with the Axelar integration and why David Schwartz himself called it years in the making.

[00:01:39]Then we move into real-world asset tokenization, and I have some numbers here that genuinely surprised me.

[00:01:45]After that, the Visa and EarthPort connection that most people still do not fully understand. And we will close with the Brazil developments and what the first spot XRP ETF approval outside the US actually signals about where this is all heading.

[00:01:59]Let us start with Axelar because this is the piece that changes the DeFi conversation for XRP entirely.

[00:02:05]XRP has a market cap that has crossed $200 billion. It has one of the largest and most passionate communities in all of crypto.

[00:02:13]And yet until recently XRP holders had virtually no access to DeFi.

[00:02:18]No productive use for the asset, no yield, no liquidity provision, no cross-chain movement in any meaningful decentralized way.

[00:02:26]That is not a small gap. That is a structural ceiling on adoption.

[00:02:31]And Axelar is what removes that ceiling.

[00:02:34]Here is what matters about this partnership. The Ripple and Axelar teams did not rush this. David Schwartz, the chief technology officer of Ripple, one of the original architects of the XRP ledger, described the diligence process in a way that tells you everything about the stakes involved. He said he knows where the bodies are buried in the code base.

[00:02:53]That is the language of someone who has stress tested every assumption, traced every failure point, and built with the understanding that what comes next involves trillions of dollars of real institutional money.

[00:03:04]You do not talk that way about a speculative side project. You talk that way about infrastructure.

[00:03:10]What Axelar provides is a decentralized interoperability layer. Essentially, a messaging and bridging protocol that allows assets to move across blockchains securely and without a centralized intermediary.

[00:03:22]And the reason this matters specifically for XRPL is twofold.

[00:03:26]First, it opens DeFi access for XRP holders who have been locked out of that ecosystem. Second, and arguably more importantly, it positions the XRP ledger as a destination chain for real-world asset tokenization at scale.

[00:03:39]The mechanics are elegant. When you move an asset cross-chain through Axelar, it swaps on the origin chain, bridges through Axelar's decentralized layer, and completes a final swap on the destination chain.

[00:03:52]The whole process takes around 20 seconds and critically the user does not have to understand any of that. It is completely abstracted away. That is what institutional grade user experience looks like, not a 12-step tutorial. 20 seconds, done.

[00:04:07]And Axelar is already the most mature decentralized interoperability solution in the space.

[00:04:12]Two and a half years after launch, it remains the only one that is actually decentralized. Not promising to decentralize later, not describing a road map, already there.

[00:04:22]The Ripple team made the ambition explicit. Within two years, they believe the XRP ledger can emerge as the leading platform for real-world asset tokenization powered by secure programmable interoperability.

[00:04:34]One integration, trillions of dollars in potential value.

[00:04:39]Which brings us to the real-world asset story. And this is where the numbers get genuinely staggering.

[00:04:45]Real-world asset tokenization is the process of representing ownership of physical or financial assets on a blockchain.

[00:04:51]Real estate, bonds, equities, commodities, intellectual property, anything that holds value can in theory be tokenized.

[00:05:00]And the reason this matters so much for the XRP ledger specifically is that Ripple has spent years building relationships with exactly the institutions that hold these assets.

[00:05:09]Banks, payment networks, financial infrastructure providers. The trust layer is already there. Now, when people talk about the size of this opportunity, most estimates land around 10 to 20 trillion dollars by 2030.

[00:05:23]But the research being circulated recently puts that figure between 16 and 68 trillion.

[00:05:28]68 trillion. That is not a typo. That is the upper bound of what analysts believe could be tokenized in this decade alone, driven by the fact that a massive portion of global wealth is currently locked in illiquid assets accessible only to institutional investors and ultra-high net worth individuals.

[00:05:45]Tokenization changes that equation across every dimension. It enables fractional ownership, meaning a retail investor can hold a slice of a commercial real estate asset or a bond portfolio that was previously completely out of reach.

[00:05:59]It creates 24/7 liquidity in markets that currently only operate during business hours in specific time zones.

[00:06:05]It enforces transparency through immutable on-chain records. It automates compliance through smart contracts, and it reduces transaction costs by eliminating intermediaries who currently extract fees at every step of the settlement process.

[00:06:20]Every single one of those benefits maps directly onto what the XRP ledger was designed to deliver.

[00:06:26]There is also a concept here that Ripple has been advancing for years called the Internet of Value.

[00:06:31]The idea is simple but profound. Just as the Internet made information move instantly, frictionlessly, and without geographic limitation, the Internet of Value does the same for money and assets.

[00:06:43]Stocks, securities, votes, frequent flyer points, music rights, scientific data, anything that carries value to someone can be exchanged directly peer-to-peer without a bank or clearinghouse sitting in the middle collecting a toll.

[00:06:57]And here is why the incumbents are paying attention.

[00:07:00]Right now, banks and corporations operating across multiple countries have to hold large reserves of local currency in each country they do business in.

[00:07:07]These are called nostro accounts.

[00:07:11]Estimates put the total value trapped in these accounts somewhere between 5 and 27 trillion dollars, sitting idle, generating nothing, existing purely as a logistical requirement of a slow, fragmented financial system.

[00:07:24]The Internet of Value eliminates that need entirely. That trapped capital gets freed. That is not a marginal efficiency gain. That is a structural transformation of how global finance operates.

[00:07:36]Now, let us talk about Visa, because this connection is older and deeper than most people realize, and it directly answers the question of how XRP gets into the hands of the payment networks that already touch billions of people.

[00:07:48]In 2009, Visa acquired a company called Earthport.

[00:07:52]Earthport is a Ripple-enabled payment rail. It processes cross-border transactions using RippleNet and XRP as the liquidity layer.

[00:08:00]Which means that through this acquisition, Visa gained direct functional access to XRP's settlement capabilities. Not as a pilot program, not as a press release partnership, but as an operational infrastructure asset.

[00:08:12]And in their 2025 investor report, Visa explicitly identified crypto as a strategic focus for cross-border payments.

[00:08:20]This is not speculation. This is in their documents.

[00:08:24]To understand why this matters at scale, consider what Visa's network actually represents. Over 200 countries, more than 60 million merchants, one of the largest payment networks on the planet.

[00:08:36]When XRP is positioned as the settlement asset within even a fraction of that network, the liquidity demand is enormous. And Visa is not alone in this.

[00:08:45]Mastercard has been moving in the same direction. American Express, similarly.

[00:08:49]These companies are not adopting crypto out of idealism. They are doing it because payments is their entire business model, and any technology that makes payments faster, cheaper, and more reliable is either something they adopt or something that displaces them.

[00:09:04]They chose adoption. And the asset they are building around is XRP. The Swift connection is worth noting here as well.

[00:09:11]XRP's integration with Swift, the global messaging network that underpins most international bank transfers, means that the pathway from legacy financial infrastructure to next-generation blockchain settlement is not a distant theoretical future. The connective tissue is already in place.

[00:09:28]Now, let's talk Brazil, because this story has two separate components that together tell you something important about the direction of global XRP adoption.

[00:09:36]The first is the ETF approval. Brazil's securities regulator approved the Hashdex Nasdaq XRP index fund set to trade on the B3 exchange.

[00:09:46]This is the first spot XRP ETF approval anywhere in the world, and while the US ETF story is still developing with multiple filings already submitted to the SEC, including from Cboe for several products, Brazil's approval establishes a critical precedent. It proves the regulatory pathway exists. It proves institutional appetite is real, and it creates competitive pressure on other regulators to follow.

[00:10:10]Because capital does not wait for the slowest regulator. It flows toward accessible opportunity.

[00:10:16]The second Brazil story is arguably more significant for the long-term thesis.

[00:10:21]The Braza Group is launching a Brazilian real pegged stablecoin built natively on the XRP ledger.

[00:10:27]This is the first public example of something that the XRP community has been anticipating for a long time.

[00:10:33]A third-party financial institution using the XRP ledger stablecoin infrastructure to issue their own currency-backed digital asset. Not Ripple's stablecoin, but built using the same technology and the same rails.

[00:10:46]Initially targeting institutional clients with plans to expand to consumer markets and streamline cross-border liquidity.

[00:10:53]Why does this matter so much? Because it answers the fundamental question about how value accumulates on the XRP ledger.

[00:11:01]Think of it this way. Every stablecoin, every tokenized asset, every central bank digital currency that gets issued on the XRP ledger adds economic weight to that ecosystem. The more value that lives on chain, whether that takes 5 years or 20 years to fully materialize, the more demand there is for the native asset that facilitates settlement and liquidity within that ecosystem.

[00:11:23]Retail speculation can move a price temporarily. Utility drives it structurally. And utility-driven price appreciation is the kind that holds.

[00:11:32]There is also a Bank of America angle here that is worth acknowledging.

[00:11:35]Reports indicate Bank of America is positioned to begin using XRP for transactions, contingent primarily on regulatory clarity from the SEC signaling that using XRP in financial infrastructure does not carry legal risk.

[00:11:50]Once that clarity arrives, the institutional on-ramp is not just open, it is already built.

[00:11:56]The banks do not need to figure out how to use it. They have been preparing.

[00:12:00]They just need the green light. Let us end with the big picture number, because I think it reframes everything we have discussed today.

[00:12:07]Someone recently asked ChatGPT whether $10,000 XRP is theoretically possible.

[00:12:13]And the answer, framed correctly, is actually really instructive.

[00:12:18]The key is understanding that XRP is not a stock. It is not valued based on company earnings or ownership rights. It is a utility asset, a settlement mechanism. Its price is influenced by the volume of value flowing through the XRP ledger, and the velocity at which XRP itself is used to facilitate that flow.

[00:12:38]The faster XRP settles transactions, the less total supply is needed to support any given volume, which means as global demand increases and settlement velocity stays high, the price required per unit to sustain that volume rises.

[00:12:51]Fedwire alone moves approximately $4.5 trillion per day. A single Ripple partner, CGI, can facilitate up to $21 trillion per day.

[00:13:02]Those two numbers alone put daily global payment flow well above $25 trillion, and that is before you include chips, CHAPS, TARGET, SWIFT, and every other system layered on top.

[00:13:14]The ChatGPT estimate of $7 trillion global daily flow was not just conservative, it was off by a significant multiple.

[00:13:22]The actual scale of what XRP is being positioned to handle is far larger than even optimistic retail estimates tend to account for.

[00:13:30]Does that mean $10,000 per XRP is inevitable? No.

[00:13:34]Nothing in markets is inevitable. But, does it mean the ceiling is structurally higher than most people are modeling?

[00:13:40]Absolutely, yes.

[00:13:42]And more importantly, the infrastructure being built right now is consistent with a long-term vision where XRP handles a meaningful share of global value transfer.

[00:13:50]Not a footnote in crypto history. The settlement layer of the financial internet.

[00:13:56]Here is what I want you to take away from today.

[00:13:59]The XRP story is not one thing. It is not just an ETF play. It is not just a Visa story. It is not just a stablecoin story or a DeFi story or a tokenization story.

[00:14:10]It is all of those things converging at the same time. Each one independently significant, collectively transformative.

[00:14:18]The Axelar integration unlocks DeFi for a $200 billion asset community. The Brazil stablecoin proves the tokenization model works in the real world.

[00:14:27]The Visa EarthPort connection puts XRP inside a 60 million merchant global payment network.

[00:14:32]And the ETF approvals are creating the institutional on-ramps that bring the next wave of capital in.

[00:14:39]Infrastructure does not announce itself loudly. It gets built quietly, piece by piece, until one day the world looks around and realizes the new system is already running.

[00:14:48]That is what we are watching happen in real time with XRP.

[00:14:52]The question is not whether you understand the thesis. You clearly do.

[00:14:56]You just watched this entire video.

[00:14:58]The question is whether you are paying close enough attention to act on it before the headlines catch up. Stay curious. Stay informed.

[00:15:06]And I will see you in the next one.