How big is the cross-border payments market XRP competes for?

The full answer

The most-cited totals put cross-border payments near $190 trillion a year. Bank of Italy Governor Fabio Panetta said in a May 2025 speech that the market “was estimated at over $190 trillion” in 2024.[1] According to FXC Intelligence, the total is the total addressable market (TAM) for the wholesale and retail cross-border payments market. By our arithmetic, 1% of that total is $1.9 trillion a year, 10% is $19 trillion and 20% is $38 trillion. Those are flows of payments over a year. They are not money that would have to sit in XRP, because the same XRP can settle many payments, as covered on why liquidity depth matters for XRP as a bridge.

How fast has the market grown, and how reliable is the $300 trillion projection?

The larger number comes from a speech, not a BIS forecast. In the same May 2025 speech, Panetta called the 2024 market “nearly twice the size of global GDP” and said it “is projected to surpass $300 trillion within the next 5 to 10 years.” The BIS published the speech; it does not say who made the projection.[1]

An older forecast gives a sense of how these numbers move. In 2023, Victoria Cleland of the Bank of England said cross-border payments were forecast to rise “from almost $150 trillion in 2017 to over $250 trillion by 2027.”[2] Her speech footnote cites a 2020 Financial Times op-ed by Jon Cunliffe for the forecast.[2] With over $190 trillion reached by 2024, the 2027 figure would need growth of about a third in three years, by our reading of the two sets of numbers.

A private data firm gives a third line. FXC Intelligence put the total at $194.6 trillion for 2024 and forecast $320.2 trillion by 2032.[4] In March 2026 it put the 2025 total at $208 trillion.[5] These totals come from different producers, so they should not be set side by side as if one had grown into the other.

How much of this market could a bridge asset actually serve?

Much less than the headline, though no source found as of September 29, 2026 puts a number on the part a bridge asset could serve. Three pieces of evidence narrow it.

First, most of the value is wholesale. FXC counted $39.9 trillion of 2024 flows as non-wholesale, which it also calls retail and which covers payments by large companies, small businesses and consumers, including $31.6 trillion of business-to-business payments.[4] The rest, about 79.5% of its total by our calculation, is wholesale. FXC said in 2026 that wholesale payments “continue to dominate global cross-border flows.”[5]

Second, much of the wholesale side already runs on systems built for it. The BIS Triennial Survey counted $9.6 trillion of FX trading a day in April 2025, with the US dollar on one side of 89% of trades.[6] A June 2026 BIS study found that more than $14 trillion of FX obligations were settled on an average day in April 2025: 36% through payment-versus-payment systems, 54% using methods such as netting, and 10% gross bilaterally between banks.[7] CLS says it settles over USD8.0 trillion of payments a day in 18 of the most traded currencies and that its netting “shrinks funding requirements by over 96%.”[8] A bridge asset has the most to offer where a currency pair lacks such a system and a deep dollar market, or where money waits in prefunded accounts. How much money sits in those accounts is on whether the prefunding problem is real.

Third, FX trading and cross-border payments are different measures. FX swaps were the largest part of April 2025 turnover, at $4 trillion a day, and the BIS notes that swaps and forwards are “commonly used in hedging currency risk.”[6] Dividing either total by 365 to compare it with the other would mislead.

Where is XRP in this market today?

Ripple’s own figure is small against these totals. It says its payments network has processed “over $100 billion” in total, without stating the period.[9] Even counted in full, that is about 0.05% of one year’s flow at $190 trillion, by our calculation. Not all of Ripple’s volume uses XRP, as set out on how much Ripple’s payment volume uses XRP. crypto.news reported in July 2026 that Ripple Prime cleared $3 trillion, and concluded that the part of it that becomes XRP demand is “small enough that no serious estimate puts a meaningful number on it.”[10]

What a given share of the market would imply for XRP holdings is worked through on how much XRP liquidity a share of payments would need, and what it might mean per coin on what a share of this flow would imply per XRP. How much cross-border value already moves on stablecoins, which compete for the same flows, is on global stablecoin volume.