A calculation showed XRP would need to trade in the high double digits, tens of times above its current price, to overtake bitcoin's market capitalisation.

The Crypto Basic, a blockchain media outlet, reported on Sept. 15 local time that Ripple's former chief technology officer David Schwartz (데이비드 슈워츠) said XRP could one day surpass bitcoin, but that the premise was faster growth in XRP rather than a sharp drop in bitcoin.

At the time, XRP was trading at around $1.4 and had a market cap of about $88 billion. Bitcoin was around $77,200, with a market cap of $1.55 trillion, about 18 times that of XRP. For XRP to narrow the gap, its market cap would need to rise sharply, and it would need to grow to the trillion-dollar level to stand shoulder to shoulder with bitcoin.

A hypothetical scenario was also presented. If bitcoin's market cap expands to $3 trillion, XRP would need a market cap above $3 trillion to surpass it. Based on a circulating supply of 62.74 billion tokens, an XRP market cap of $3.1 trillion would put the price at about $49.40 per token. Compared with about $1.38, that would imply a rise of about 35 times.

Still, $50 is not a fixed target. The required XRP price depends on how high bitcoin is at the time XRP attempts to overtake it. With bitcoin's market cap at $3 trillion, bitcoin's price would be about $150,000 based on the current supply. If bitcoin rises further, the market cap XRP needs to surpass it would also increase.

Schwartz's outlook is drawing attention for how the market-cap reversal would happen. While he saw XRP as capable of moving ahead of bitcoin, he did not expect a scenario in which people leave bitcoin in large numbers and move into XRP. Instead, he saw the overall crypto market growing larger and XRP taking a bigger share of that growth.

Schwartz in particular judged that the XRP Ledger, or XRPL, offers functions that bitcoin does not have. Bitcoin continues to hold high value, but the idea is that the XRP ecosystem expands faster and narrows the market-cap gap.

From a market perspective, the outlook rests on a very high set of assumptions. XRP would need to show faster growth for a long period even as bitcoin continues to rise. Schwartz did not present a timeframe for when XRP might overtake bitcoin, and he also did not directly say XRP would reach $50.

Ultimately, the figure of around $50 is closer to an illustrative example that assumes bitcoin's market cap is $3 trillion. As of now, XRP shows a wide gap with bitcoin in both price and market value, and whether it can overtake bitcoin remains a scenario that would require the broader market to expand, bitcoin's gains and XRP's market-share growth to align.