If the custodian mechanism reduces the XRP supply by 20%, the new price of XRP could reach $66.67. 🧵🧵🧵
Currently, the total supply of XRP is a staggering 99.9 billion. Notably, approximately 60 billion are already in circulation, while 35 billion remain in custodian custody by Ripple.
However, this supply situation has long been a point of contention within the XRP community. Specifically, some argue that Ripple should burn custodian tokens, arguing that this would drive up the price and alleviate concerns about centralized supply. However, no one can definitively say what impact this would have on the value of XRP.
Therefore, we consulted Google Gemini about what would happen if Ripple burned 20% of the total XRP supply. Gemini responded that they provided a hypothetical model but clarified that the prediction was entirely theoretical. They explained that the final outcome would depend on realistic factors such as investor demand, token utility, and regulation, not just a reduction in supply.
In its hypothetical scenario, Gemini assumes the burning of 20% of the total supply, approximately 19.98 billion tokens. This would reduce the total supply from 99.9 billion to approximately 79.92 billion tokens.
It's worth noting that if all the burned tokens came from custodial accounts, the custodial pool would decrease from 35 billion XRP to approximately 15.02 billion. However, since the burning only affects tokens in custodial accounts, the number of tokens in circulation would remain unchanged at 60 billion.
Gemini points out that this won't immediately change the token's trading volume, but it will significantly reduce future supply. According to the chatbot, this supply reduction could create long-term upward pressure, as reduced supply tends to drive up value when demand remains stable or increasing.
Based on this, Gemini proposes its so-called "super-optimistic" scenario. In this scenario, the burning would trigger strong market excitement, receive clear support from regulators, and lead to higher adoption rates for XRP Ledger.
Under these ideal conditions, Gemini predicts that XRP's market capitalization could surge to approximately $4 trillion. This figure would be nearly 28 times higher than XRP's current market capitalization of $144 billion. For reference, the current total market capitalization of the entire cryptocurrency market is approximately $4 trillion.
Based on this assumption, Gemini calculated XRP's potential new price by dividing the predicted $4 trillion market capitalization by the circulating supply of 60 billion tokens. The result is approximately $66.67 per XRP. This is a significant increase from the current price of $2.40, representing a 27.8-fold rise.
Gemini points out that this is not a prediction, but a theoretical assessment designed to demonstrate the potentially huge impact of a large-scale sell-off of XRP if the market reacts positively. However, Ripple CTO David Schwartz previously stated that burning XRP tokens might not have any impact on XRP's price at all.