As the financial industry accelerates its move toward tokenising real-world assets, attention has increasingly focused on the rails that could support this shift. Proponents argue that XRP and the XRP Ledger already possess the tools needed for asset issuance and tokenized value transfers, long before tokenisation became a mainstream concern. Ashish Birla highlighted that the XRP Ledger was capable of tokenising assets such as gold more than a decade ago, underscoring the platform’s early readiness.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure was built long before the current wave of institutional interest in tokenised finance. Major financial firms such as BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are actively entering the tokenisation race, and regulatory clarity is gradually evolving as institutional capital flows into the digital asset infrastructure. The market is increasingly focusing on the same challenge the XRP Ledger was designed to address.
If tokenised real-world assets moving on-chain eventually reach trillions of dollars in scale, the network that provides the rails that settle value could become extremely important. XFinanceBull argues that the technology cycles tend to follow a predictable path, in which infrastructure is built first, and then price follows adoption. The XRP Ledger’s throughput is a key factor in this assessment, with tests showing the network closes a block every 3 to 5 seconds and can sustain about 1,500 transactions per second under normal conditions, translating to roughly 129 million transactions per day. In a 2021 stress test, Ripple and Pyypl pushed XRPL beyond 50,000 transactions per second while maintaining a settlement time of 3 to 4 seconds, equating to about 4.3 billion transactions per day.
Compared with other payment and blockchain systems, the numbers are notable. Visa averages around 1,700 transactions per second, with a peak capacity of 65,000, while Ethereum processes roughly 15 to 30 transactions per second, and Bitcoin averages 7 transactions per second. Ripple CTO David Schwartz noted that the upper limits of the network are still unknown. Despite that capacity, the XRPL network is currently processing only about 1 million transactions per day, which represents less than 1% of its tested capacity.
In this view, the limiting factor for XRPL is not infrastructure, but the level of real-world adoption.
Leave a Reply