Roony1990

$XRP Transactions Per Second (TPS) and Annual Velocity are the most misunderstood parts of price projections. Take 2 minutes to read this. You won't regret it.

Most people in the XRP community underestimate the raw utility and mathematical inevitability of XRP’s price trajectory if it becomes the backbone of global settlement. Let’s start with something foundational: TPS. The XRP Ledger currently handles around 1,500 transactions per second under real-world conditions, but it has demonstrated capacity for over 3,400 TPS in stress tests. If horizontally scaled through sidechains or validator optimization, it could reach 10,000 TPS or more. This matters because the number of transactions per second directly determines how many times each XRP token can be used in a given year—its velocity.

Now consider circulating supply. While 100 billion XRP exist, most analysts expect only 20–60 billion will be truly circulating once you factor out cold storage, ETF reserves, long-term staking, and institutional lockups. Some models even assume just 10 billion XRP will remain liquid. Velocity is calculated by dividing the number of annual transactions by circulating supply. At 10,000 TPS, XRP can process 315.36 billion transactions annually. With 20B supply, that gives a max velocity of 15.8. With 60B, it’s 5.26. At 1,500 TPS, the annual volume drops to 47.3 billion transactions, and velocity collapses—down to just 0.79 turns per year with 60B XRP in circulation.

So how much value could XRP realistically settle on-chain in the future? Estimates range from $500 trillion to $1 quadrillion annually. These aren’t fantasy numbers—they represent a fraction of the total addressable market for cross-border payments, foreign exchange, tokenized securities, derivatives, and real-time gross settlement. The SWIFT network alone facilitates over $5 trillion per day. Ripple has stated they aim to capture at least 10–14% of that. Add in the tokenization of stocks and bonds, the FX market, and payment corridors across governments and institutions, and $1 quadrillion per year becomes a conservative target by 2030.

Now to the math. The price per XRP is modeled using MV = PQ, where M is the circulating supply, V is the velocity, and Q is the total value transacted. At 10,000 TPS and 20B circulating supply, XRP can turn over 15.8 times per year. To handle $1Q of volume: Price = Q ÷ (M × V) = 1,000T ÷ (20B × 15.8) = $3,165. Even with 60B XRP, the price remains around $3,145 because velocity scales inversely. But if TPS remains limited to 1,500, velocity drops sharply. With only 0.79 turns per year on 60B XRP, XRP would need to reach over $21,000 to handle the same $1Q flow.

The conclusion is clear: price is not just about hype or speculation. It’s about math. Whether XRP has 10B or 60B in circulation, and whether the network runs at 1,500 or 10,000 TPS, the result is the same: if XRP is to settle hundreds of trillions or even a quadrillion dollars annually, a four- or five-digit price per token is not only reasonable—it’s required.