Standard Chartered Says XRP Hits $28 by 2030 but Ripple’s Own Stablecoin May Have Other Plans

The post Standard Chartered Says XRP Hits $28 by 2030 but Ripple’s Own Stablecoin May Have Other Plans appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

XRP’s (CRYPTO:XRP) price action this year has been nothing short of underwhelming. The news around Ripple’s network kept getting better while the XRP price kept getting worse. Regulators have reclassified XRP as a digital commodity and XRP ETFs have pulled in more than a billion dollars, but the XRP price has been steadily declining since the year started.

Today, XRP trades near a dollar, which is its weakest level since November 2024 and down more than half over the past year. With the XRP price now seemingly close to breaking below $1, is this the floor before institutions finally re-rate XRP? More importantly, can XRP still reach the $28 forecast set by Standard Chartered by 2030?

The XRP Price Is at a 52-Week Low

At around $1, XRP is roughly 72% below the $3.65 high it reached in the middle of 2025. Anyone who bought XRP during that run is now deep underwater, and the fall has been a slow grind, month after month.

The whole crypto market has been selling off, with Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) down near $60,000 at multi-month lows, dragging most altcoins down with it. But XRP’s slide stands out because it’s coming during the exact stretch when almost everything is going right for Ripple.

XRP holders are left staring at two very different possibilities for the coin by 2030. In the first, this is simply the bottom. The legal fights are over, the ETFs are pulling in money despite the selloff, and large holders have been buying quietly all the way down. On that read, the pieces are already in place, and XRP just needs institutions to arrive in size.

In the second, the good news never reaches the price. XRP keeps powering a busy network and Ripple keeps signing partnerships, while the token itself slowly fades into the background. It is useful to Ripple’s business but not something anyone needs to hold. Which of those two futures wins is what every XRP price prediction for 2030 is really betting on.

The $28 XRP Price Prediction Rests on One Big Assumption

The $28 call by Standard Chartered is one of the most bullish XRP price predictions by any institution. The bank’s analyst, Geoffrey Kendrick, forecasts XRP reaching $28 by 2030. It’s a roughly 27-fold jump from where the coin trades today, putting its market value near $1.7 trillion—a level only Bitcoin has ever reached.

Kendrick has stuck with that number even as the market turned against him. Earlier this year, he slashed XRP’s end-of-year target from $8 to $2.80, but he left the $28 mark for 2030 exactly where it was.

Meanwhile, Bitwise—the crypto asset manager—ran XRP through a formal valuation model and came out with three very different outcomes for 2030, ranging from $29.32 at the top all the way down to 13 cents.

There’s more than a 200-fold gap between Bitwise’s bullish and bearish forecasts for XRP by 2030, which sounds absurd until you actually look at what’s driving it. Every target rests on the same bet that XRP captures a chunk of the payment and settlement volume Ripple is winning. Bitwise’s $29 forecast assumes it does, but its 13-cent prediction assumes it doesn’t—if banks stick to the old system and dollar stablecoins move the money instead.

This is also why the wild calls we see online, like the $100, $500, or $1,000 XRP predictions, are easy to set aside. A $100 XRP price would need a market value more than double the entire crypto market today, which isn’t realistically happening this decade.

So, the forecasts worth taking seriously top out around $28 to $29, and the more grounded ones fall in the high single digits to low teens, and that’s where our own $8 to $12 forecast comes in. But every one of them quietly leans on that same assumption that the token itself, not just Ripple’s network, captures the cross-border payment volume flowing through it.

Why RLUSD’s Boom Is Harming XRP’s Growth

XRP’s network is doing better than it has in years, and almost none of that has reached the token’s price. Activity on the XRP Ledger has been climbing toward record highs, with the liquidity in its trading pools more than tripling this year, even as XRP itself lost half its value over the past year.

The reason is RLUSD, Ripple’s own dollar-pegged stablecoin, which has quietly taken over the network. It has grown to around $800 million on the XRP Ledger, where the pool pairing it with XRP is now the second-largest on the chain. So, money is pouring onto the network, but into RLUSD rather than XRP.

XRP was built to be the bridge, the asset a bank buys for a few seconds to move money between two currencies. But a bank moving millions would much rather hold a steady dollar than a token that can swing at any given moment, so whenever RLUSD is an option, most institutions skip XRP. The result is that much of the payment volume Ripple handles never touches XRP at all.

And the wallets driving RLUSD’s growth are exactly the ones the optimists are counting on. Around 82% of it is held by just ten addresses, which means this is institutions and trading desks, not retail buyers. That helps Ripple’s payments business a lot, and does almost nothing for someone holding XRP and waiting for demand to arrive.

Now, none of this is necessarily permanent. Because RLUSD’s biggest pool is paired against XRP, heavier stablecoin use could eventually start pulling demand back into the token. That hasn’t happened yet, and it’s the biggest deciding factor hanging over XRP’s price between now and 2030.

What Has to Go Right for XRP to Re-Rate by 2030

For XRP to grow into the higher end of those forecasts, a few things have to break its way, and a couple are working against it.

The Tailwinds

The primary source of new demand for XRP is the exchange-traded funds. XRP ETFs have pulled in around $1.47 billion since launching, and the inflows have held up for seven straight weeks even while the XRP price fell. If they keep pulling in money, that demand could push XRP back above its old highs and beyond, especially if inflows reach the $4 billion range Standard Chartered is counting on.

The CLARITY Act is what could unlock flows that big. It would permanently classify XRP as a commodity, giving cautious institutions the legal cover to commit serious money, but it has a tight window to pass before the Senate breaks for the summer. The XRP Ledger is also winning tokenization business, pulling in around $1.9 billion over three months, more than Ethereum managed in the same stretch.

The Drags

XRP’s own supply is one of the main things working against it. Ripple still holds around 33 billion XRP in escrow, releasing about a billion of it every month on a fixed schedule. Most gets relocked, and the market has absorbed these releases for years, but it’s a constant trickle of new supply that demand has to keep soaking up just to hold the price steady.

Only about 62 billion of XRP’s eventual 100 billion supply is in circulation today, so the fully diluted value already runs to roughly $102 billion against a market value nearer $63 billion. Every XRP price target is a bet on a number that keeps climbing as more tokens come into existence.

How Much Will One XRP Actually Be Worth by 2030?

The most likely outcome we predict for XRP by 2030 is a price between $8 and $12, which is well short of Standard Chartered’s $28 prediction. The network is thriving, but the token still isn’t capturing that growth, and that is what keeps the bigger numbers out of reach.

That said, XRP ETFs have pulled in over a billion dollars, tokenization is moving onto the XRP Ledger, and the CLARITY Act becoming law would unlock more institutional adoption. But every month another billion tokens unlock, and most of the network’s new money moves through RLUSD rather than XRP.

So we expect XRP to grind higher instead of rallying to $28 by the end of the decade. That bigger move only happens once banks start routing payments through XRP itself, not the stablecoin that keeps standing in for it.

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