SWIFTs

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Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse used XRPL Apex 2025 to set an audacious target for the company’s native asset. “If you’re driving all the liquidity, that’s good for XRP … so I’ll say five years, 14 percent,” he told the audience, distinguishing sharply between SWIFT’s well-known messaging layer and the liquidity rails that actually move money.

“SWIFT today, there’s two ways to think about SWIFT. There’s messaging and there’s liquidity. Liquidity is owned by the banks. I think less about the messaging and more about liquidity,” the Ripple CEO said.

Garlinghouse’s forecast came during a dialogue with Ripple’s chief technologist David Schwartz, who framed the broader prize: “We’re going to see many, many hundreds of billions of dollars in tokenized … assets fairly quickly.” Schwartz argued that blockchains solve a mundane but stubborn problem in corporate audits—“How do you know I don’t owe somebody money that isn’t in the records you’re checking?”—and that this built-in transparency will accelerate adoption.

What XRP’s 14% SWIFT Takeover Could Mean

Quantifying Garlinghouse’s projection depends on which slice of SWIFT’s activity one counts. From the daily lens, industry data widely quoted in payments-technology literature shows SWIFT messages directing almost $5 trillion every 24 hours. Fourteen percent of that flow is roughly $700 billion per day—a value that could, under Ripple’s thesis, migrate to XRP-based liquidity rails.

From the annual payments lens and the cross-border payment traffic alone, SWIFT has been estimated to settle about $150 trillion a year. Fourteen percent of that narrower baseline would still amount to $21 trillion annually, more than the combined 2024 GDP of Japan and Germany.

Either yard-stick underscores the scale of the ambition: if XRP were to intermediate even the lower $21 trillion figure, its settlement throughput would eclipse that of most major national payment systems.

Garlinghouse’s insistence on “liquidity” rather than “messaging” mirrors Ripple’s strategy since 2018, when it began pitching XRP as a real-time bridge asset for banks preferring to keep nostro-vostro balances lean. SWIFT itself, serving over 11,500 institutions, acknowledges it “sends trillions of dollars every day,” a breadth Ripple cannot ignore.

That focus also explains Ripple’s recent engineering milestones showcased in Singapore: Native support for institutional-grade tokenization modules, aimed at the “hundreds of billions” Schwartz referenced. A re-architected liquidity hub that auto-routes fiat and digital-asset trades to minimize slippage when large banks unwind positions intraday.

XRP is the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, hovering near $132 billion during the conference. Although the token has quadrupled in value since the 2024 US election cycle, turnover remains a fraction of what would be required to handle a multi-hundred-billion-dollar daily flow.

Ripple says its on-demand liquidity corridors processed “single-digit billions” last quarter; scaling to Garlinghouse’s target would therefore entail a two-order-of-magnitude jump.

At press time, XRP traded at $2.25.

XRP price, 1-day chart | Source: XRPUSDT on TradingView.com

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

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