Can XRP Flip Bitcoin?
Ripple's CTO Emeritus went on record saying XRP will surpass Bitcoin in market value, but the math behind that claim reveals just how steep the climb actually is.
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Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz said on an X Spaces on September 9 that he expects XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) to eventually pass Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) in market value, and he attached a condition to it. XRP trades at $1.36 and Bitcoin near $77,310 as of September 12.
Bitcoin’s market capitalization runs between $1.54 trillion and $1.58 trillion, XRP’s between $85 billion and $89 billion, a difference of about $1.49 trillion. So can XRP flip Bitcoin?
Schwartz Attached One Condition to His Answer
On the X Spaces hosted by ILLY, a listener named Angie asked Schwartz whether XRP could flip Bitcoin. His answer was “Yeah, I do.” Schwartz is Ripple’s CTO Emeritus and an architect of the XRP Ledger, the settlement network that clears XRP transactions and issues the coin.
“It wouldn’t happen from Bitcoin shrinking. It would happen from XRP growing faster than Bitcoin,” he said. Schwartz described a crypto market that keeps expanding, with XRP compounding faster inside it, so both assets rise and XRP rises more.
“I think XRP surging is probably more likely than not,” he said in the same conversation. Schwartz named no price, no timeline, and no level XRP would need to clear on the way, which makes the answer an opinion about direction rather than a number anyone can trade against.
XRP Would Need $24.50 to Match Bitcoin’s Market Cap
Market capitalization is the price of a coin multiplied by the number of coins in circulation, and it’s the standard way traders compare the size of one crypto asset against another. The difference between the two totals is what a flip has to close.
Against 62.7 billion circulating XRP, matching Bitcoin’s current market capitalization would put XRP at about $24.50. The number belongs to the market, not to Schwartz, who never said it.
The figure is 6.4 times XRP’s all-time high of $3.84, set in January 2018 and never reached since. The target also moves, because if Bitcoin’s market capitalization keeps growing, the price XRP needs to catch it rises with it, which is the scenario Schwartz described.
XRP Has Passed a Larger Coin Before
In early 2018, XRP briefly became the second-largest cryptocurrency at about $86 billion in market capitalization, above Ethereum at the time. That run came in a bull market and it moved fast, which is why the episode gets cited whenever Schwartz’s condition comes up.
XRP passed Ethereum from about 15% behind. It trails Bitcoin by 18 times. Bitcoin also has spot ETFs, corporate treasuries and settled regulatory status that Ethereum didn’t have back then. A repeat of the 2018 move at the same scale would only return XRP to second place.
What XRP Would Have to Do First
The flip works on the arithmetic only if Schwartz’s condition holds, because XRP has to grow to roughly 18 times its current value to close a $1.49 trillion gap without Bitcoin losing any. That’s years of outperformance, and nothing scheduled before the end of 2026 delivers it. XRP has gained 34.59% over the past month against Bitcoin’s 21.77%, which is the direction Schwartz described but nowhere near the scale.
Several consecutive quarters where XRP’s market capitalization grows faster than Bitcoin’s would be the first visible sign, alongside payment volume on the XRP Ledger that no Bitcoin product competes for. Until then, XRP flipping Bitcoin is unlikely any time soon, and possible only if the whole crypto market keeps expanding and XRP expands faster inside it.
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Sam Daodu is a crypto analyst who's spent nearly a decade making blockchain understandable—no easy task when most whitepapers read like fever dreams. He writes for 24/7 Wall St., covering Bitcoin, altcoins, and crypto market analysis for investors. Before crypto, he was a tech writer (back when explaining "the cloud" was peak innovation). Since 2018, he's written for CoinTelegraph, Yahoo Finance, The Block, Cryptonews, Zypto, Rain, and more—basically anywhere people want crypto news without the headache. Sam runs MacLabs Marketing, a content agency for crypto brands tired of sounding like AI wrote their website. He also publishes free crypto education on his site for Web3 enthusiasts who think "gas fees" is a typo. When he's not writing or staring at charts, Sam's either: - Watching anime (currently convinced One Piece has better tokenomics than most altcoins) - At the gym sculpting himself into a Greek god - Listening to the music your mum warned you only bad boys listen to Connect: LinkedIn | Email | MacLabs Marketing
