XRP is a cryptocurrency that offers extremely efficient transactions thanks to its unique architecture. In addition, XRP has a very dedicated community that’s closely following every move made by the project and there’s often speculation about where the price of XRP could go in the future.

Some XRP holders are even wondering if Ripple could reach $10,000. The short answer is that Ripple will never reach $10,000 or a price even close to this level. The reason for this is that the supply of XRP is simply too large for the coin to reach $10,000 in any realistic scenario. 

In this article, we will be considering different price targets for XRP to see whether they are achievable. We will also take a quick look at XRP’s price history and our XRP price prediction. Before we do that, let’s quickly learn the most important facts about XRP.

What is XRP?

XRP is a cryptocurrency that initially launched in 2012. It was created by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto, a trio of developers who were interested in Bitcoin but wanted to create an alternative that was more suitable for payments and consumed less energy.

The three creators of XRP were joined by investor Chris Larsen and founded the company that is today known as Ripple. After the company was created, they “gifted” 80 billion XRP (80% of the maximum supply) to the company. Today, Ripple still owns a very significant portion of the XRP supply, although the vast majority of their XRP holdings is locked in special escrow accounts. As of October 2023, 46.3 billion XRP is locked in escrow.

XRP is a cryptocurrency that uses a unique consensus mechanism called the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol. It allows transactions to be processed extremely efficiently, making XRP one of the cheapest cryptos to transfer. An XRP transaction costs less than $0.001 in fees and is usually completed in under 5 seconds.

Due to its efficiency, XRP is used by Ripple in some of its products. The most notable XRP-powered product from Ripple is On-Demand Liquidity, which provides efficient cross-border money transfers facilitated by XRP.

What would a price of ,000 mean for XRP?

When trying to evaluate realistic price targets for a particular cryptocurrency, it’s crucial to first understand its supply. In the case of XRP, there’s a maximum supply of 100 billion coins, while there are about 53.6 billion coins actually in circulation.

If we know a coin’s supply, we can easily calculate what its market capitalization would be assuming any given price. This can be done simply by multiplying a coin’s supply with the price.

To get a better idea of why many XRP investors’ price targets are unrealistic, let’s take a look at what different price points would mean for the market capitalization of XRP. We’ll include the implied market capitalizations using both XRP’s current circulating supply and its maximum supply.

So, could Ripple reach $10000? Even the simple calculation we showed above shows that this would be practically impossible. If the full supply of XRP was in circulation and the price reached $10,000, the market capitalization would be $1 quadrillion. Even if we calculate the market cap using the current circulating supply of XRP, it would be $536 trillion if the price of 1 XRP was $10,000.

At the time of writing, XRP is trading at $0.65. In order to reach $10,000, it would have to increase in price by 19,230x. Such gains are simply not reasonable to expect from an asset that already has a market cap of $27.5 billion.  

Let’s use a real-world example to show why XRP reaching $10,000 is completely unrealistic. As we explained above, XRP reaching $10,000 would imply an XRP market cap of 1 quadrillion. At the time of writing, the world’s largest company by market capitalization is Apple, and it has a market cap of $2.9 trillion. The price of Apple stock would need to increase by a whopping 343x to achieve a $1 quadrillion market cap.

Another reason why we shouldn’t expect Ripple to ever reach $10,000 is that the highest price XRP has reached so far was about $3.9. Ever since this peak was achieved in January 2018, the XRP price has never come particularly close to matching it. 

The highest price XRP has reached since its 2018 ATH was $1.97. This is somewhat concerning since there was a market-wide bull run in 2021 in which most major cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, achieved new all-time highs.

Will XRP go up?

One of the main reasons why XRP wasn’t able to reach a new all-time high in the 2021 crypto market bull run was the ongoing lawsuit between Ripple and U.S. securities regulator SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). The SEC is alleging that XRP is an unregistered security issued and sold by Ripple, while Ripple is fighting against this claim.

This regulatory uncertainty surrounding XRP has undoubtedly made some investors cautious about parking their money in XRP. In addition, many crypto exchanges delisted XRP after the SEC sued Ripple to avoid any regulatory issues.

However, XRP’s future could still be bright. We could see positive price action in the XRP markets if the lawsuit resolves in a way that’s favorable for Ripple and XRP. 

Of course, there are also other factors that could help bring the price of XRP up in the future. The XRP Ledger is still in active development, and new features could expand its use cases, resulting in new users joining the network.

For example, there are now NFTs on the XRP network, which is a use case that was absent just a few years ago. Developers are also working on a sidechain for the XRP Ledger that’s compatible with the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). However, this project is still in the proof of concept stage.

XRP price prediction for 2023 and 2024

According to the XRP price prediction on CoinCodex, XRP holders could be in for a rough ride in the final weeks of 2023. The XRP prediction is currently forecasting that the XRP price could even drop below $0.46 in the last days of this year. 

However, our Ripple (XRP) price prediction is also expecting XRP to go on a strong rally in Q2 of 2024, which would bring the price of XRP close to the $1.8 mark. 

When trying to predict cryptocurrency prices over a long time period, we need to keep in mind that cryptocurrencies are very volatile, which makes predictions difficult. Predictions can change quickly as changing market conditions impact technical analysis.  

The bottom line: ,000 is a completely unrealistic price target, but XRP could still grow

It’s pretty clear that XRP will never reach a price of $10,000, as the coin’s market capitalization would be unrealistically large at that price. The only way 1 XRP could be worth $10,000 would be through a massive coin burn program or a redenomination of XRP.

For now, most XRP investors are hoping that the lawsuit between Ripple and the SEC will resolve favorably for Ripple. If this happens, we could see a significant spike in the XRP price, and the coin would also likely be re-listed on leading exchanges like Coinbase.

If you want to learn more about the pros and cons of investing in XRP, check out our article, where we explore if XRP is a good investment. For more information about XRP's economics, check out the XRP rich list.