XRP Price at $10: The Financial Plumbing Argument That Has Nothing to Do With Hype

Jake Claver does not start with a price chart when he makes the case for XRP reaching $10. He starts with a problem that has existed in the global financial system since 1944 and has never been cleanly solved.

The Triffin Dilemma describes the tension that emerges when a national currency serves as the global reserve asset. The issuing country must run persistent trade deficits to supply the world with liquidity, gradually undermining the credibility that made its currency desirable in the first place. The United States has been living with that contradiction for eight decades.

Claver’s argument is that XRP removes that tension entirely. As a neutral non-sovereign settlement asset that belongs to no country and settles transactions in seconds at negligible cost, it fills a gap in the global monetary architecture that no existing instrument addresses cleanly. That is not a speculative thesis. It is a description of a structural problem and an asset whose properties happen to solve it.

The more immediate mechanism he is watching is the Japanese yen carry trade. When that trade unwinds at scale, Japanese investors selling U.S. Treasuries to repatriate yen push yields higher at precisely the moment the U.S. government can least afford rising borrowing costs. 

The natural absorber of that Treasury supply in his framework is stablecoin demand. Under the GENIUS Act, stablecoins are required to hold U.S. Treasuries as reserves. As stablecoin supply expands, institutional demand for Treasuries expands alongside it, providing the buyer the bond market needs when carry trade unwinding creates the seller.

XRP sits inside that mechanism. RLUSD, Ripple’s regulated stablecoin, operates on XRP Ledger infrastructure. Every dollar of RLUSD issued creates demand for the ledger’s settlement capacity. Every cross-border payment routed through Ripple’s network is a transaction where XRP serves as the bridge asset between currencies. The stablecoin market becoming a systemic Treasury buyer is not a crypto story. It is a bond market story. And Ripple is building the infrastructure it runs on.

The $10 price target follows from market cap mathematics rather than sentiment. XRP at $10 with approximately 60 billion tokens in circulation implies roughly $600 billion in market capitalisation. 

Ripple’s acquisition strategy is explicitly designed to capture that scale. Hidden Road’s prime brokerage infrastructure, GTreasury’s corporate treasury management software and Rail’s stablecoin payment rails each add institutional connectivity that routes more financial activity toward the ledger.

The timing is the variable Claver cannot control. The CLARITY Act, if passed before the August recess, removes the last major regulatory barrier for U.S. institutions building compliant products on XRP infrastructure. The yen carry trade unwind, if it accelerates in Q3, creates the bond market conditions that make stablecoin demand a systemic priority rather than a niche conversation.

What Claver watches is not the XRP price chart. It is weekly stablecoin supply data, GENIUS Act implementation timelines and the pace at which Ripple’s acquired businesses route volume through the ledger they were bought to serve.

“The price follows the infrastructure,” he said. “And the infrastructure is further along than almost anyone outside this space realises.”

At $1.07 today, the gap between current price and a $10 target is significant. Claver’s argument is that the gap measures how early the infrastructure story still is, not how speculative the target is.