In a recent tweet, Ripple’s chief technology officer (CTO) shared insights on cryptocurrency use in payments including XRP, shedding light on its valuation in relation to payments.

In response to an X user, Schwartz remarked that virtually no crypto is being used for payments. XRP on the other hand has wide availability, is among the top five in terms of market capitalization and has low fees and fast confirmations. The Ripple CTO, on the other hand, believes it is not being utilized more for payments for the same reasons that other cryptocurrencies are not being used for payments.

As reported, Schwartz indicated that lower prices for XRP could make payments more expensive. “If XRP costs $1, they’d need a million XRP which would cost $1 million. If XRP cost a million dollars, they’d need one XRP which would, again, cost $1 million,” he explained.

In another comment, the Ripple CTO clarified what he meant, saying: “That won’t make your payments any cheaper. It’ll just mean that buying and selling the same value of XRP moves the market against you more, making payments even more expensive.”

Schwartz went on to highlight obstacles to adopting stablecoins for payments. There are essentially two types of people who require payments: those who are well-connected to existing financial systems and those who are not, implying that stablecoins will face similar challenges as cryptocurrencies to gain traction in payments.

Ripple CTO debunks XRP price manipulation

Regarding the XRP price, the Ripple CTO responded to claims of price manipulations by saying: “We’ve looked for evidence that changes in our activity affect the price of XRP and weren’t able to find any. Even over 8 years, XRP price and XLM price track absurdly well.”

Schwartz also reacted to an X user who complained about the circulating supply of XRP and requested that Ripple do more to support XRPL developers: “I’m very open to suggestions for ways we could do more to support developers. People complain the distribution is too concentrated and then they complain too much is being distributed. There just aren’t a lot of other options.”

At the time of writing, XRP was up 0.66% in the last 24 hours to $0.586.