Ripple: XRP Could Account for 14% of Cross-Border Payments Volume

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse reportedly said Wednesday (June 11) that the company’s XRP cryptocurrency could account for 14% of the cross-border payment volume currently handled by SWIFT within five years.

Noting that SWIFT handles messaging while banks handle liquidity, Garlinghouse said, “I think less about the messaging and more about liquidity,” Seeking Alpha reported Friday (June 13).

“If you’re driving all the liquidity, it is good for XRP … so I’ll say five years, 14%,” Garlinghouse said while speaking at the XRP APEX 2025 event in Singapore, per the report.

XRP serves as a bridge currency, facilitating instant exchanges between currencies and reducing the need for traditional banks to park money abroad, according to the report.

Enterprises are warming up to alternative cross-border money movement vehicles, including blockchain-based solutions that offer streamlined cross-border flows while freeing up capital previously trapped in correspondent accounts across multiple countries, PYMNTS reported in June 2024.

These enterprises are doing so because cross-border payments are fraught with inefficiencies, high fees and delayed transactions, largely due to the ongoing limitations of traditional methods and legacy infrastructure.

Blockchain technology offers transformative potential to address these issues by streamlining processes and reducing costs, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Can Blockchain Solve the Cross-Border Payments Puzzle?”

The report found that by using distributed ledger technology to enable direct transactions without intermediaries, blockchain technology reduces costs and speeds up settlement times, with transactions potentially completed in seconds rather than days.

It added that permissioned decentralized finance could lower transaction costs by up to 80% compared to traditional methods.

When Shopify announced Thursday (June 12) that is rolling out a feature that enables merchants to accept USDC stablecoins, the company said the new capability will allow merchants to “sell to a customer on the other side of the world as easily as their next-door neighbor.”

On June 5, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company is considering using stablecoins to transfer money among different countries because they can help reduce the cost of moving money.

“That’s super interesting to us, and we’re definitely going to take a look,” Khosrowshahi said.