Ripple (and XRPL) aim to connect banks, payment providers and digital asset exchanges, enabling real-time settlement and lower transaction fees. Since US President Donald Trump’s election victory, transfer values on XRPL have increased notably in US dollar terms.
In the two months following Trump’s victory, XRP surged almost 600%, emerging as the top performer across the top 15 digital assets by market cap. This was largely due to a reflection of market expectations that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would drop its appeal of a court case concerning Ripple along with the possibility of SEC approving XRP exchange-traded funds (ETFs) under the Trump Administration’s crypto-friendly mindset.
To recap, the SEC filed a motion back in 2020 charging Ripple with conducting an unregistered security offering for the XRP token. In 2023, a New York court ruled that XRP was not a security when sold to the public on an exchange, but that it was a security when sold to institutional investors; these definitions applied to all cryptocurrencies.
Since then, SEC has dropped its appeal of that court decision following Trump’s win and since then, XRP’s price has surged going into such a favourable environment.
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Experts like Standard Chartered’s global head of digital asset research Kendrick Geoff believe that besides a favourable environment, XRP’s use as a payment method could possibly help with its widespread adoption across the world given the similar uses of XRPL and stablecoin.
“XRP is uniquely positioned at the heart of one of the fastest-growing uses for digital assets – facilitation of cross-border and cross-currency payments. In this way, XRPL is similar to the main use case for stablecoins such as Tether. Stablecoin’s use has grown 50% annually in the past two years and we expect stablecoin transactions to increase 10 times over the next four years which we think bodes well for XRPL’s throughput growth,” Geoff states.
Ripple is also pushing for XRPL into the tokenisation space, which, while still small, is expected to grow “rapidly” according to Geoff. In November 2024, a tokenised money market fund, Archax, became available on the XRPL for the first time. In addition, two tokenised treasury bills have been launched on the XRPL in recent months.
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However, Geoff warns that there are negatives to consider when looking at XRPL’s future. One of which is that XRPL has a relatively low number of developers considering its large market cap which can limit the ability to generate ongoing creative solutions for XRPL going forward.
“If XRPL can attract more outside developers on the back of new business lines (like tokenisation), that would enhance XRP’s competitive edge going forward,” says Geoff.
Another negative would be the low fee capture relative to other chains. To put it into perspective, total XRPL fees amounted to US$1.1 million ($1.49 million) compared to Ethereum’s US$2.1 billion in 2024, which is extremely significant considering the market cap for Ethereum is only about twice that of XRP.
As XRPL starts to move into stablecoins and tokenisation, more fee revenue would be needed to justify XRP’s valuations, according to Geoff.
Nonetheless, Geoff is optimistic that these negatives could be offset with the potential ETF inflows in the coming months pending XRP’s ETF approval.
XRP ETF applications have been filed by Grayscale, Wisdom Tree, Bitwise, Canary and 21Shares. The SEC officially acknowledged the Grayscale application on Feb 14, triggering a number of timelines for approving, denying or extending the application; the final deadline would be Oct 12.
“We estimate about US$4-8 billion of XRP ETF inflows within the first 12 months of approval and we expect ETF approval in the Q3 of 2025,” states Geoff.
Geoff believes that XRP is capable of reaching US$5.50 by end-2025 and US$12.50 by end-2028.
