You see this $100 XRP price target pop up every bull run, and it always sounds so convincing when people talk about it online. But here's what David Schwartz actually thinks about that narrative, and honestly it cuts through all the noise.

Schwartz, who's been around Ripple and XRP longer than most, made a simple observation that most people gloss over. He's basically saying: if rational investors genuinely believed there was even a 10% shot that XRP hits $100 in the next few years, the market would look completely different right now. We wouldn't be sitting here with XRP trading around $1.31.

Think about it. If that belief was real, sellers would get wiped out at current levels. Buyers who actually thought those odds were real would be accumulating aggressively. They'd bid up the price fast. Supply would dry up. None of that is happening. And that tells you something important about what the market actually thinks versus what people say they think.

This isn't Schwartz being bearish or defensive. It's just probability and how capital actually moves. When real money is on the line, people reveal what they actually believe through their actions, not their Twitter threads. The gap between what someone says and what they're willing to buy at is where price discovery really lives.

Schwartz pushes back on the idea that crypto prices are mostly noise or manipulation too. His take is that most prices reflect something fairly rational most of the time. They're balancing potential upside against regulatory risk, adoption timelines, how much competition exists, and all the uncertainty baked in. When massive bull runs do happen, it's usually from stuff nobody saw coming. Regulatory changes. Macro shocks. Structural shifts in how capital moves.

For XRP specifically, a lot still hinges on external factors. Actual payments adoption. Whether institutions actually use it. Whether regulators finally give clarity. These don't move on a schedule, so the market prices that uncertainty in every single day.

The thing is, XRPL's core utility hasn't gone anywhere. Payments, settlement, asset exchange - that's still the purpose. It still works regardless of what the price is doing. But utility alone doesn't force valuations to $100. Markets want to see it work at scale first.

Schwartz's point is uncomfortable if you're really bullish, but it's solid. Price isn't a promise. It's a probability-weighted guess made by millions of people trading real capital every day. You can run the math yourself. Change the target, change the odds, change the timeframe - the conclusion usually ends up in the same spot. The market isn't sleeping. It's voting with money. Right now, that vote isn't for $100.