As the financial industry accelerates its push toward tokenising real-world assets, attention is increasingly turning to the infrastructure that could support this transformation. Advocates argue that XRP and the XRP Ledger may already have the tools that are needed for this shift and have supported asset issuance and tokenized value transfers long before the concept became a mainstream focus in global finance.
How The XRP Ledger Handles Asset Issuance At Scale
The current developments around XRP are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore as the broader financial world begins focusing on tokenisation. According to a post on X by crypto analyst XFinanceBull, the former Ripple executive Ashish Birla has recently highlighted a crucial detail that many investors may overlook: the XRP Ledger was already capable of tokenizing assets such as gold more than a decade ago.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure was built long before the current wave of institutional interest in tokenised finance. Currently, major financial firms such as BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are actively entering the tokenisation race. As regulatory clarity gradually evolves, institutional capital is flowing into the digital asset infrastructure, and the market is finally 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 Math Behind XRP Ledger’s Massive Throughput Potential
The question of whether the XRP Ledger can handle real global-scale transaction volume is best answered with simple math. Crypto investor Grape explained that the network closes roughly every 3 to 5 seconds and can sustain about 1,500 transactions per second under normal conditions, which translates to roughly 129 million transactions per day without reaching its limits.
Grape pointed out a major stress test conducted in 2021 involving Ripple and Pyypl pushing the public XRPL beyond 50,000 transactions per second while still maintaining a settlement time of 3 to 4 seconds, which amounts to approximately 4.3 billion per day. When compared to 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.