Family-office adviser Jake Claver has laid out a sequence-of-events case for XRP that inverts the usual crypto adoption playbook: utility does not come first and pull price up with it. Instead, in Claver's framing, an ETF-driven liquidity shock has to lift the price into a band where institutions can start using the asset for the settlement workloads Ripple has spent years engineering for.
Speaking with Bearable Bull on a Good Evening Crypto recap published Friday, Claver argued the long-running XRP community debate over what catalyst comes first — adoption, ETF flows, regulatory clarity or repricing — has the order backwards.
"A lot of people have said, okay, it's got to be utility. We're going to start using it. It's going to drive the adoption. It's going to drive the value higher," Claver said. "I think that the price has to be at a certain level before they can even start to use it. And the mechanism by which they're going to do that is through the ETFs and a rotation of liquidity during a crisis."
The mechanism Claver described layers two regulatory developments on top of the existing US spot XRP ETFs, which have already taken in close to a billion dollars in inflows but have yet to materially compress circulating supply. The first is anticipated Bank for International Settlements designations for digital assets, which Claver expects to elevate XRP into a category alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana.
"You have the BIS giving designations for four digital assets — Bitcoin, ETH, Solana and XRP. I've said for a long time that the BIS would come out and regulate XRP a tier-one asset similar to US Treasuries or gold. And I think we're not far from that at all," he said.
The second is the US Clarity Act, which Claver sees as the trigger that finally lights up the rest of Ripple's enterprise stack. He pointed to Ripple's recent acquisitions — a prime brokerage, a stablecoin business and a treasury management arm bundled under the Ripple One umbrella — as a parallel financial-services platform that has been built on the XRP Ledger but is not yet running at scale.
"Whether it's the prime brokerage, the stablecoin services or the treasury management company, none of these products are really running live on the XRP ledger just yet," Claver said. "And all of that will kick off after the Clarity Act is signed here in the summer of 2026."
Claver attached scale figures to those acquisitions that he said most market participants do not appreciate. He referenced GTreasury's $13 trillion in payment processing last year and the Ripple Prime business at roughly $6 trillion, both of which currently sit on traditional rails rather than on XRP.
"That's all traditional, $13 and $6 trillion, and that's Ripple's ecosystem, right? They bought these companies. They've rolled them in. And that's just the traditional side. So they haven't even implemented any of the digital payments or the efficiencies that they're about to create," Claver said.
The longer-term claim is the most aggressive part of the segment. Claver and the host both gestured toward a structural role for XRP and the XRP Ledger in global settlement infrastructure that, if it materialises, would mark a generational shift.
"XRP is going to be the asset that is the anchor for that financial system, and the XRPL is what all backend settlements," Claver said. "It'll be the base layer kind of like the bond market is now. Yes, it'll be the backbone of the financial system, I believe, by 2027."
Bearable Bull pressed Claver on a separate-but-related theory linking XRP's repricing to a Tether-style liquidity event. Claver invoked the so-called Shane Ellis thesis, in which Bitfinex liquidity dries up, Tether faces operational issues, and exchanges are forced to adopt a new settlement mechanism — with XRP as the unique candidate to step into that gap.
"Bitfinex goes illiquid, Tether's got issues, they've got to adopt a new settlement mechanism, and there's a ton of demand for XRP, and he showed how that could get to $500 just off of Bitfinex's volume. But if you had that happen across all the exchanges and you need it for these other applications, that's a lot of demand for XRP all at one time," Claver said.
The argument lands at a conviction-level price target rather than a model output: that under a stacked ETF-plus-stablecoin-stress scenario, XRP repricing happens vertically rather than along a smooth adoption curve, and that real-world use cases only switch on after the price has moved.
The host of Good Evening Crypto, who reaired the segment, framed the underlying point in terms of family-office and prime-brokerage demand rather than retail.
"Prime brokers can take collateral from any balance sheet — if you're a corporation or an individual or whatever you have. Maybe you wanted to do a laddered Treasury strategy, or you want a certain stock or exposure there. They can translate that liquidity while you still hold on to the asset," Claver said, describing what Ripple Prime's offering enables.
For now, none of the structural pieces — BIS designation, Clarity Act sign-off, Ripple One products going live, ETF supply absorption — have arrived together. Claver's thesis is that when they do, the order will surprise even XRP holders who have been waiting for it.