Pantera Capital founder Dan Morehead told CNBC that Ripple is targeting the cross-border payments turf long held by SWIFT. Ripple's own materials show its payments platform settles in fiat, RLUSD, USDC, or USDT as well as XRP, and the company has not disclosed what share of its volume actually moves through the token.
Dan Morehead, founder and CEO of Pantera Capital, told CNBC that Ripple is going after the cross-border payments turf long dominated by SWIFT. According to CNBC: "Ripple is going after Swift". Morehead made the comment during a Squawk Box segment that also touched on Solana's transaction throughput and Bitcoin's role as digital gold, framing Ripple's SWIFT ambition as one of several major blockchain use cases rather than an imminent takeover.
What SWIFT does and what Ripple built
SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the dominant messaging system that coordinates payment instructions between banks across borders. Ripple has spent years building infrastructure meant to offer faster, cheaper settlement as an alternative to the correspondent-banking chain banks currently use.
But Ripple Payments, the company's product for banks, fintechs, and payment providers, settles in fiat, RLUSD, USDC, USDT, or XRP — it is not XRP-exclusive. Per Ripple's own cross-border payments page, the platform supports whichever asset a business requires, and the company states its settlement layer is decoupled from any single issuer's token.
Enterprise growth has not settled the XRP question
Ripple's site reports payout access across more than 60 markets and cumulative processed volume above $100 billion. Those are company-reported figures, and they do not show what share of that volume settled in XRP versus stablecoins or fiat rails.
This gap has shadowed Ripple since the SEC filed its lawsuit against the company in December 2020, alleging XRP constituted an unregistered security. Ripple secured a partial win in 2023 when a federal judge ruled that XRP was not a security when sold to retail investors on public exchanges, though the broader regulatory picture around institutional sales remained unresolved. Throughout that fight, Ripple kept expanding its payments network and partner list, a track record investors have repeatedly treated as a signal for XRP's price even when the two move independently.
Ripple's own explainer on how it uses XRP in cross-border payments describes a hybrid model where digital assets act as bridge currencies alongside stablecoins and fiat conversion, useful for reducing pre-funding requirements. Morehead's comment is real institutional validation of Ripple's strategy, but it is not a substitute for Ripple disclosing what fraction of its payment volume actually settles in the token.
Source: Cryptonews
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