A new XRP market thesis is circulating ahead of the Senate markup of the CLARITY Act on Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 10:30 AM ET, with The argument centers on whether the legal safe harbor for digital assets would allow major banks and payment networks to use production-scale XRPL liquidity pools.
In one after On X, Van Code described the upcoming markup as a potential trigger for XRP’s institutional use case. He described the legislation not only as a new policy milestone, but also as the missing legal layer for large regulated financial institutions to engage more directly with on-chain settlement infrastructure.
Why XRP Needs $10 for Bank Scale XRPL Liquidity
“The digital asset market has spent a decade in beta. This Thursday, May 14, 2026, the CLARITY Act Senate Mark provides the final legal API for G-SIBs (Global Banks) to move trillions from static Nostro accounts to the XRPL. By converting Ripples 40B+ Escrow into Protocol-Native Liquidity Pools (LPs), we are witnessing a structural revaluation of at high speed.”
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The core of the thesis is that Ripple’s XRP escrow, long seen by market participants as a potential source of future selling pressure, could instead become a strategic liquidity reserve if deployed in automated market maker pools. Van Code called this “the mechanical shift,” arguing that escrowed XRP could be used to create deep pools for institutional corridors rather than simply entering the circulating supply through sales.
In his scenario, the CLARITY Act would provide the regulatory safe harbor that banks need to interact with XRP Ledger-based liquidity. Ripple could then deposit between 5 billion and 10 billion XRP from escrow into pools such as RLUSD/XRP, EURCV/XRP and JPY/XRP. The post argues that this would create a deeper base of bridging liquidity and a stronger market structure for large transfers.
“For years, Ripples Escrow was a ‘sell pressure’ bug. In the post-CLARITY world, it becomes a liquidity feature. The trigger: CLARITY Act passes -> banks get legal safe harbor.”
Van Code linked the thesis to four institutional corridors that he believes are already forming around XRPL-compatible settlement flows. These include RLUSD for US dollar treasury and B2B activities, Societe Generale’s EURCV for European institutional settlement, JPY-related corridors involving SBI and Kiraboshi, and Ondo’s OUSG as yield-bearing collateral. He also cited Mastercard and Societe Generale as examples of participants already connected to on-chain infrastructure, arguing that the missing ingredient is liquidity depth rather than connectivity.
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The most aggressive part of the statement is the pricing logic. Van Code argued that bank-scale settlement requires pools large enough to handle large transfers without material slippage. In his example, moving $100 million in one block with less than 0.1% slippage would require about $20 billion in total value.
That assumption leads to his $10 XRP scenario. At a price of $1.47, he argued, the large pools would need about 18 billion XRP, which he described as mathematically impractical due to liquidity constraints. At $10, on the other hand, the same liquidity base would require roughly 2.7 billion XRP, a level he labeled as more sustainable for institutional deployment.
“The price isn’t hitting $10 because of the hype; it’s hitting $10 because TVL needs to scale to handle the Mastercard/Bank volume,” he wrote.
At the time of writing, XRP was trading at $1.46.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com