Rob Cunningham: Let’s Speculate and Cook
Rob Cunningham: Let’s Speculate and Cook
7-24-2026
Let’s speculate and cook.
• A $3–4 quadrillion tokenized global economy.
• 10,000+ Stablecoins issued
• 50% of the global financial services ecosystem regularly uses XRP as a bridge asset.
• XRP being the dominant neutral bridge asset across thousands of payment networks & nations.
• Deep liquidity is recognized as the critical infrastructure layer for global settlement.
Under these assumptions, a simple way to think about it is:
The larger the amount of value that must be efficiently bridged, the greater the economic value of the liquidity pool supporting those transfers.
This still doesn’t determine price by itself, because price depends on factors such as how much XRP is actually available for liquidity, how often it turns over (velocity), and how much capital markets assign to holding that liquidity.
Using these broad illustrative assumptions rather than precise forecasts, what do you imagine a likely XRP value range to be?
In this thought experiment, XRP is valued less like a traditional investment and more like critical infrastructure.
A useful analogy is to imagine the Internet:
TCP/IP became the universal communications protocol.
Fiber-optic backbones became essential infrastructure.
Cloud data centers became foundational infrastructure.
ILP is analogous to TCP/IP.
XRPL is analogous to the global settlement backbone.
XRP is analogous to the highly liquid reserve that allows value to move efficiently between otherwise separate financial systems.
The thesis is that the scarce resource is no longer computing power or information – it is trusted, globally accessible settlement liquidity.
If markets came to view that liquidity as indispensable infrastructure for a multi-quadrillion-dollar economy, then valuations far above today’s levels would be consistent with that scenario.
