Why One Analyst Says a Tether Shock Could Supercharge XRP

The seasoned analyst describes Tether as “the liquidity for all of crypto,” emphasizing how deeply embedded USDT is across trading venues.

Beyond touting that it is “the largest stablecoin in the market,” the host highlights its profitability, calling Tether “the most profitable company per capita in the world,” with roughly a hundred or so employees and an asserted $5 billion in profit per quarter.

USDT’s dominance shows up in trading pairs: “Almost any coin out there has a USDT pair,” the host notes. Many small-cap tokens list only a USDT pair and no alternatives, which he likens to dangerous concentration risk. If a project “only has a USDT pair and isn’t connected to other stablecoins or other tokens,” it is effectively at the mercy of a single counterparty.

He extends a traditional finance rule of thumb to crypto: in valuing companies, no vendor, employee group, or client should account for more than 15% of revenue. In crypto terms, having one stablecoin as the only on/off-ramp creates “a choke point and that is not a good thing.”

Against that backdrop, XRP is presented as the only asset with pair depth comparable to USDT. Jake Claver claims “XRP has almost the same amount of pairs as Tether. It’s significant,” positioning XRP as the logical fallback if Tether falters.

Size of execution is central to his argument. For large trades, he suggests that even a “billion-dollar trade in Bitcoin” would likely execute through Tether via algorithms such as TWAP or VWAP rather than straight USD.

By contrast, XRP/USDC markets might fill only “five, ten, fifteen thousand dollar” clips before larger orders fragment across multiple fills, whereas “a quarter million, a million, two million, ten million… twenty million” is “child’s play for Tether.”

If USDT were “disrupted and it was no longer available to be traded through” the analyst believes exchanges would lose access to most of their practical liquidity. His provocative contention: the only realistic workaround would be to “take all the XRP off the market and start using that,” which in his view would trigger a dramatic XRP supply shock.

For investors, the takeaway is less about predicting a Tether collapse and more about recognizing concentration risk in stablecoin infrastructure. Tokens that rely solely on USDT pairs may face outsized liquidity risk, while assets with diverse pairings — notably XRP, according to the host — could become structurally more important if Tether were ever constrained.

The segment also underscores how dependent institutional-scale flows are on stable, deep liquidity rails. If those rails run primarily through one private issuer, any disruption — regulatory, operational, or market-driven — could reshape volumes, spreads, and which assets exchanges lean on to rebalance books at size.

For now, USDT remains the central hub of crypto trading, but the analyst’s comments highlight a scenario in which its dominance could abruptly reprice risk across the entire market — with XRP positioned, at least in theory, as one of the few viable substitutes.

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