Digital Ascension Group CEO Jake Claver has challenged the crypto industry's focus on market capitalization, arguing that XRP's price must rise substantially—potentially to $100 or more—for the network to effectively handle institutional-scale payment flows. In a March 26 video presentation, Claver introduced his "Liquidity Index," a six-variable model designed to measure a digital asset's functional utility and stability rather than its speculative valuation.
The framework assesses market depth, liquidity continuity, slippage, available supply, settlement speed, and accessibility. Claver emphasized that for a payments asset to power the next financial system, it requires a "high stable price" to function at a global scale, not just volatile speculation. He stated, "The assets that will power the next financial system can't just be volatile speculation. They actually require a high stable price in order to function at a global scale."
Claver's central argument hinges on supply dynamics and market depth. He compared XRP's market to a swimming pool, where the water represents liquidity. If a bank wanted to move $100 million using XRP, a shallow market would cause significant price dislocation. "If XRP is worth $1 each and you need to move $100 million to the network, you need a hundred million tokens sitting in the pool ready to be able to absorb that trade," Claver explained. "But as the pool gets larger and let's say XRP is worth $100 each, you only need a million tokens to absorb the same $100 million trade."
The analyst highlighted the critical issue of slippage, noting that a $100 million XRP transaction today could incur approximately 10% slippage, equating to a $10 million loss. In contrast, traditional equity markets handle similar-sized trades for less than half a percent. To bridge this gap, Claver argues the value on XRP's order books needs to grow by 20 to 100 times. With a fixed token supply, price appreciation must accomplish this alone.
Claver also pointed to a shrinking available supply of XRP due to factors like ETF products from firms like Grayscale and Franklin Templeton, corporate and bank treasury holdings, and DeFi pools locking tokens away from exchange liquidity. This creates a "fixed supply, growing demand" scenario where rising demand collides with a shrinking float, potentially causing prices to gap higher sharply rather than rise gradually.
While XRP's 3-to-5-second settlement speed provides a significant efficiency advantage over slower networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum, allowing market makers to recycle liquidity more effectively, Claver cautioned that speed alone is insufficient if high slippage costs persist. He concluded that market cap is a superficial metric for a network intended for cross-border value transfer, and the real test is whether its order books can absorb institutional volume without destroying capital. At the time of reporting, XRP was trading at $1.3337.
