Pantera CEO Dan Morehead on Ripple’s SWIFT Ambition and the XRP Volume Gap

Dan Morehead, founder and CEO of Pantera Capital, told CNBC that Ripple is targeting the cross-border payments sector long dominated by SWIFT, reviving a comparison that has followed XRP for years without ever being tested at institutional scale. The remark highlights how a prominent crypto investor frames competitive positioning in payments, rather than indicating how much of Ripple’s actual settlement volume runs through the XRP token itself.

$XRP “Ripple is going after Swift”
– Dan Morehead, the founder of Pantera Capital pic.twitter.com/gOt5YXgGF3

— XRP_Cro AI / Gaming / DePIN (@stedas) September 17, 2025

Morehead made the comment during a Squawk Box segment that also covered Solana’s transaction throughput and Bitcoin‘s role as digital gold. He described Ripple’s ambition regarding SWIFT as one of several major blockchain use cases shaping the industry, rather than an imminent takeover of the messaging network banks rely on for cross-border transactions.

SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, functions as the dominant messaging system connecting financial institutions across borders, coordinating payment instructions between banks. Ripple has spent years building infrastructure aimed at offering faster, cheaper settlement as an alternative to the correspondent-banking chain.

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According to Ripple’s cross-border payments page, its platform supports RLUSD, USDC, USDT, or fiat, “whichever asset your business requires,” and the company states its settlement layer is decoupled from any single issuer’s token. This is a direct architectural admission that XRP is one option among several in the payment flow.

Ripple’s site also reports payout access across more than 60 markets and cumulative processed volume exceeding $100 billion. These are company-reported figures, and they do not specify what share of that volume actually settled in XRP versus stablecoins or fiat rails. The gap between enterprise-scale numbers and token-specific usage is precisely where the SWIFT comparison breaks down.

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Enterprise Progress vs. XRP Demand

This gap has shadowed Ripple since the SEC filed its lawsuit against the company in December 2020, alleging XRP constituted an unregistered security. Ripple secured a partial win in 2023 when a federal judge ruled that XRP was not a security when sold to retail investors on public exchanges, though the broader regulatory picture around institutional sales remained unresolved.

Throughout that legal battle, Ripple continued expanding its payments network and partner list. This track record has repeatedly been treated by investors as a signal for XRP’s price, even when the two metrics move independently.

Xrp (XRP)24h7d30d1yAll time

This habit of reading corporate wins as token catalysts appears elsewhere in Ripple’s current initiatives. Reports on Ripple’s AI-payments integration with Stripe generated similar optimism without clarifying how much of that flow touches XRP specifically. The question of whether payment-network growth translates into token demand is not unique to Ripple.

Ripple’s own materials, including its explainer on how it utilizes XRP in cross-border payments, describe a hybrid model where digital assets act as bridge currencies alongside stablecoins and fiat conversion. This is useful for reducing pre-funding requirements but does not prove that XRP carries the majority of the flow.

Morehead’s recognition of Ripple’s SWIFT ambition represents real institutional validation of the company’s strategy. However, it is not a substitute for Ripple disclosing what fraction of its payment volume actually settles in the token. Until that number surfaces, the SWIFT comparison remains a narrative rather than a measured outcome.

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