Why a $150 Trillion Industry Charging 6% Per Transfer Makes XRP One of the Most Important Assets in Finance

A senior executive at one of Asia’s leading financial firms just made one of the clearest institutional cases for XRP heard in recent months, and the numbers he cited are difficult to argue with.

Sagar Shah, Chief Business Officer of EverNorth Asia, sat down for an interview covering the XRP Ledger ecosystem and its potential role in global finance. 

“Structural to Finance”

Shah did not hedge his view on XRP. “I see XRP as being structural to finance,” he said, “and I see a lot of potential, a massive amount of potential for XRP.”

The foundation of that conviction starts with the cross-border payments market, which Shah described as fundamentally broken at its core. “Cross-border payments is a market worth over $150 trillion per year,” he said, “and the existing system is just really poor. They charge 6% just to send maybe a $200 payment across the border.”

To put that in perspective: a 6% fee on a $200 remittance means the sender loses $12 before the recipient sees a cent. Multiply that across trillions of dollars in annual flows and the inefficiency becomes a structural tax on the world’s poorest and most financially underserved populations. XRP, built specifically to solve exactly this problem, is positioned at the centre of that market.

Regulatory Clarity Is Arriving

Shah pointed to a wave of regulatory progress that is quietly removing one of the biggest barriers to institutional XRP adoption. “We’re starting to see a lot more regulatory clarity around XRP and blockchain,” he said, citing the SEC’s landmark decision in the United States, MiCA in Europe, and what he described as advanced and progressive frameworks across Japan and the rest of Asia.

That regulatory backdrop matters enormously for institutional participants who have been watching from the sidelines. Large financial institutions cannot allocate meaningfully to assets that carry unresolved legal risk. As that risk is progressively removed across major jurisdictions, the case for institutional XRP exposure becomes significantly easier to make internally.

Goldman Sachs and $1 Billion in ETF Inflows

The institutional numbers Shah cited are the kind that tend to cut through the noise. Goldman Sachs disclosed holding $150 million in XRP ETFs at the end of 2025. That is not a retail position. That is one of the world’s most influential investment banks putting a nine-figure allocation into XRP-linked products.

Beyond Goldman, Shah said that $1 billion has flowed into XRP ETFs since the second half of 2025 alone. 

“We Are Still Very Early”

Perhaps the most significant thing Shah said was also the simplest. Despite the regulatory progress, the institutional inflows, and the structural demand for cross-border payment solutions, he believes the adoption story is only beginning.

“What’s really impressive is that we’re still very early,” he said. “The adoption of XRP is just getting started.”