The target market for XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) is the financial industry. That makes sense, given that the chain’s focus is on providing nearly free transactions which close roughly as fast as swiping a credit card. But banks and other financial institutions aren’t the only organizations that stand to benefit from those capabilities.
In fact, there’s another category of potential users of XRP that could demand so much of the coin that its price rises for years on end, potentially surpassing $3, assuming they actually hear about it and decide to use it. So does this possibility make the coin a buy, or is the opportunity too uncertain to confidently invest on?
People tend to migrate toward sources of economic opportunity. Often, this leads people to cross international borders. Then, once those people have an income, they very often send some of their money to family in their home country in a transfer called a remittance.
In 2023, per the U.S. Federal Reserve, about $818 billion worth of remittances were sent. That sum is expected to grow consistently in the coming years, and it may increase by as much as 2.8% in 2025. Only about half of remittance transfers are thought to be recorded in formal channels, so the true growth rate may be even higher, as well as the true total sum of the transfers.
People sending remittances encounter some troublesome issues with regularity. Between transfer costs and currency exchange fees, international money transfers can in some cases incur fees as much as 20% of the amount being sent. Furthermore, such transfers can take as long as five business days to close, which is a long time for hard-earned cash to be out of pocket from the standpoint of both migrants and their family members awaiting their money.
For reference, as of 2024, remittances transferred out from the U.S. using any fintech service totaled nearly $30 billion. Therefore, there is an opportunity for XRP to capture some of this colossal transfer volume, both from the U.S. to elsewhere, and also between people and their families in other countries. Given that the coin’s 24-hour trading volume was less than $6 billion as of the morning of March 13, capturing even a sliver of the daily remittance volume would represent a gargantuan increase in demand for the coin or perhaps for a stablecoin hosted on its chain.
But does this possibility make XRP worth buying on its own?
Despite XRP being very suitable for processing remittances, marketing efforts for that purpose are only just getting started. Ripple, the company that issues XRP, is forging connections with financial institutions in the Philippines, Mexico, and India, which are all major remittance-recipient countries. But there isn’t any data on how much volume those partnerships actually generate for the chain.
