Pantera Capital founder Dan Morehead used a CNBC Squawk Box appearance to position Ripple as a competitor for part of the cross-border payments market, saying “there might be other use cases, you know, like Ripple’s going after SWIFT.” The comment frames Ripple as targeting a segment served by SWIFT, but does not claim Ripple has replaced SWIFT, displaced it, or captured a measurable share of its activity.
Morehead made the remark while surveying blockchain use cases. He said Solana’s capacity could reach as many as 9 billion transactions per day and described Bitcoin as “digital gold.” Ripple was presented as a separate category: a network aimed at a narrower financial function rather than a store of value or a high-throughput settlement layer. Social media amplified the clip as a bullish XRP signal, but the actual wording contains no market-share figure, replacement date, or forecast.
Ripple has spent years building faster and cheaper alternatives to traditional correspondent banking, where transfers can pass through multiple intermediary banks and take days to clear. Ripple says its cross-border payments platform supports real-time payouts in more than 60 markets. SWIFT, by contrast, remains the dominant global network for cross-border payment messaging between financial institutions and works mainly as a messaging system rather than a settlement network.
The token-specific question is complicated by Ripple’s enterprise structure. Ripple’s enterprise blockchain products largely operate independently of XRP. That distinction matters because Morehead’s comment is about corporate strategy and competitive positioning, not necessarily evidence of new XRP demand.
In a separate but related XRP news cycle, comments from Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse resurfaced on social media on September 24, 2026, more than eight months after they were originally made on January 22 at Faena Rose’s “The Transformative Power of Crypto Assets” program. Garlinghouse said XRP may be the best bridge asset for some cross-border payments, while a stablecoin could solve other customer needs more effectively. He explicitly rejected an XRP-only approach to utility and pushed back on being labeled an XRP maximalist.
That framing aligns with how Ripple Payments is built today. The platform supports settlement in RLUSD, USDC, USDT, or fiat, depending on business requirements and available jurisdictions. Ripple says the settlement layer is decoupled from any single issuer’s token, and the network has processed over $100 billion in payment volume across more than 60 markets.
XRP and RLUSD are structurally different tools. XRP trades freely with no issuer fixing its market price and is described by Ripple as the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger, designed as a bridge asset for fast, low-cost cross-border transactions. RLUSD is a dollar-backed asset built for payments, remittances, treasury flows, and settlement, backed one-to-one by cash deposits, U.S. Treasuries, and cash equivalents, and redeemable for U.S. dollars. That stability may make RLUSD more attractive for corporate treasurers moving predictable settlement volume, while XRP’s floating value creates different risk considerations.
The timing of the resurfaced remarks adds another layer. Garlinghouse’s January comments predate the Senate’s September 15 cloture vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which failed 49-50, short of the 60 votes needed to advance H.R. 3633. Ripple called the outcome a missed opportunity and said it does not change its position on XRP’s regulatory status, citing the SEC and CFTC’s March 2026 interpretation that identifies XRP as a digital commodity.
Overall, the latest Ripple news does not amount to a declared replacement of SWIFT or a pivot away from XRP. It reinforces Ripple’s multi-asset payments strategy, with XRP positioned as one bridge asset among several and RLUSD serving a separate stability-focused role.
