[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong] David Schwartz, Ripple's former chief technology officer, said it is difficult to simply compare an outlook for XRP at $20 with bitcoin's early break above $100.

The Crypto Basic, a blockchain media outlet, reported on May 5 that Schwartz said the debate over XRP price expectations is hard to view in the same way because the market capitalisation is completely different.

Schwartz's remarks came alongside claims in some parts of the community that XRP could reach $10,000 in the long term. He said on social media recently that there was a time when projections that bitcoin would rise to $100 also looked unrealistic. He meant there was a similar scene to some investors now viewing $20 XRP as an overly optimistic target.

Schwartz stressed there are clear limits to directly overlapping the two situations. When bitcoin first topped $100 in April 2013, its market capitalisation was about $1.3 billion. By contrast, XRP was presented at about $86.63 billion in value and about $1.4 in price. The key point is that even if both are price increases, the starting market size is very different.

That gap is also seen in the amount of money needed for XRP to reach $20. Based on a circulating supply of about 61.79 billion tokens, XRP at $20 would have a market capitalisation of about $1.23 trillion. Schwartz said that because of this scale difference, it has become more difficult for bitcoin's early explosive rise to be repeated in the same way in other large digital assets.

Citing two tokens with similar characteristics, he said if one asset's market capitalisation is 10 times larger than another's, the smaller asset is far more likely to show sharp price swings. "A small token can rise 100 percent just because one large holder starts accumulating," he said. "A large asset like XRP needs much more money to create a meaningful price move."

The comments followed earlier remarks in which Schwartz expressed scepticism about the possibility of XRP reaching $10,000. He also argued that if sophisticated investors considered the possibility of XRP reaching that price even slightly more likely, buying would already have been reflected in the price and it "should have risen closer to the $20 level". He was pointing out that the market is barely reflecting that possibility in the current price.

Schwartz's message is not focused on flatly denying XRP's upside potential. He is questioning the basis for setting expectations rather than the outlook itself. He said that rather than asserting future prices for major cryptocurrencies based on past bitcoin cases, investors should look together at current market capitalisation, circulating supply and the scale of capital inflows.

As a result, the focus of the XRP price debate is shifting from simply presenting targets to the scale of money actually required and the market structure. The key point of the remarks is that rather than whether figures such as $20 for XRP, or further $10,000, are possible, it is necessary to examine how much capital inflow an asset of the current scale requires.

It's true. I distinctly remember when $100 bitcoin seemed as crazy as $20 XRP does now. But I do want to be careful with those comparisons. The market cap of XRP now is much larger than the market cap of bitcoin was then. That makes the comparison seem a bit weak, maybe.