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Ripple CTO David Schwartz reignited $XRP’s flippening debate this week, telling a Twitter Spaces audience that $XRP overtaking Bitcoin’s market capitalization is more likely to happen through $XRP’s own growth and adoption than through any collapse in Bitcoin’s price.
Crypto analyst Zach Rector broke down what that statement actually implies for $XRP’s price, running the numbers through both market cap and fully diluted valuation.
The Math Behind the Numbers
Rector calculated that a $1.5 trillion valuation, roughly where Bitcoin’s market cap sits today, would put $XRP near $23.91 using its current circulating supply of about 62 billion tokens. At Bitcoin’s all-time high market cap of $2.5 trillion, $XRP would trade just under $40.
Taking a more conservative approach that accounts 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, figures he described as the base case under Schwartz’s own reasoning.
AI Pushback Raises the Floor
Rector said he ran the scenario through Claude to stress-test his conservative estimate, and the AI pushed back that his numbers understated the case. Since Schwartz’s flip scenario assumes a larger overall crypto market, Bitcoin’s own valuation would also be higher by the time any flip occurred, meaning $15 to $25 represents the floor of the scenario rather than a ceiling.
A More Bullish Case
Rector’s bull case, if Bitcoin reaches a $3 trillion to $5 trillion market cap and $XRP scales alongside it, has $XRP topping $50 on a fully diluted basis.
$XRP currently trades near $1.30, still well below its cycle high of $3.66. Schwartz stopped short of putting a timeline on any flip, and the scenario remains hypothetical. But his comments mark one of the clearest acknowledgments yet from Ripple’s own leadership that a Bitcoin flip through organic growth, rather than a Bitcoin collapse, is a plausible long-term outcome.