Dan Morehead, founder and CEO of Pantera Capital, told CNBC News that Ripple is going after the cross-border payments turf long dominated by SWIFT, reviving a comparison that has trailed XRP for years without ever being tested at institutional scale. The remark says more about how a prominent crypto investor frames competitive positioning in payments than about how much of Ripple’s actual settlement volume runs through the XRP token itself.
Morehead made the comment during a Squawk Box segment that also touched on Solana’s transaction throughput and Bitcoin’s role as digital gold. He described Ripple’s SWIFT ambition as one of several major blockchain use cases shaping the industry, not as an imminent takeover of the network banks rely on for cross-border messaging.
SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, functions as the dominant messaging system connecting financial institutions across borders, it coordinates payment instructions between banks. Ripple has spent years building infrastructure aimed at offering faster, cheaper settlement as an alternative to the correspondent-banking chain.
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Per Ripple’s own cross-border payments page, its platform supports RLUSD, USDC, USDT, or fiat, “whichever asset your business requires,” and the company states its settlement layer is decoupled from any single issuer’s token. That is a direct architectural admission that XRP is one option among several in the payment flow.
Ripple’s site also reports payout access across more than 60 markets and cumulative processed volume above $100 billion. Those are company-reported figures, and they say nothing about what share of that volume actually settled in XRP versus stablecoins or fiat rails. The gap between enterprise-scale numbers and token-specific usage is exactly where the SWIFT comparison breaks down.
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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. This is a track record investors have repeatedly treated as a signal for XRP’s price, even when the two move independently.
That habit of reading corporate wins as token catalysts shows up elsewhere in Ripple’s current push. Reports on Ripple’s AI-payments integration with Stripe generated similar optimism without settling how much of that flow touches XRP specifically, and the question of whether payment-network growth translates into token demand isn’t unique to Ripple.
Ripple’s own materials, including its explainer on how it utilizes XRP in cross-border payments, describe a hybrid model where digital assets act as bridge currencies alongside stablecoins and fiat conversion, useful for reducing pre-funding requirements, but not proof that XRP carries the majority of the flow.
Morehead’s recognition of Ripple’s SWIFT ambition is real institutional validation of the company’s strategy. It is not a substitute for Ripple disclosing what fraction of its payment volume actually settles in the token, and until that number surfaces, the SWIFT comparison remains a narrative rather than a measured outcome.
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