In August 2023, XRP briefly printed a price of $50 on the Gemini exchange. The crypto community largely dismissed it as a data glitch. But computer engineer and XRP analyst CharuSan argues that people who laughed missed an important lesson about liquidity.
The Mechanics Behind the $50 Spike
According to CharuSan, the event was not a glitch. It was a real market event that demonstrated catastrophic slippage. XRP had just been relisted on Gemini, and the order book was nearly empty. A single market buy order swept through every available sell order in seconds. It kept going until it hit one rogue sell order sitting at $50. The total volume required to push the price from its normal range to $50 was only $37,000.
Scaling the Problem
CharuSan’s point is not about that one candle. It is about what happens when you scale that scenario to institutional volumes. If $37,000 on a thin order book causes such severe slippage, what happens when a major bank tries to move billions of dollars using XRP for cross-border payments? The order book would not be able to absorb the volume. The price could spike instantly and uncontrollably. The transfer might fail, or settle at a price far from the intended rate, making it operationally useless.
The analyst concluded that banks cannot use XRP passively as plug-and-play users. They would need to hold pre-funded, locked XRP in dedicated liquidity pools under their own management before any large transfer begins. The Gemini candle, he says, is a mathematical proof of what happens when deep liquidity is absent.
Supply and Price Calculation
CharuSan extended the argument with a calculation. A $200 billion cross-border transfer at an XRP price of $20 would require 10 billion tokens. With roughly 61 billion XRP in circulating supply, that single transfer would consume about 16% of all available tokens. If thousands of banks were conducting simultaneous transfers, the system would face a structural bottleneck at low price levels.
At $300 per XRP, the same $200 billion transfer would need approximately 667 million tokens. That volume, he argues, the network could absorb without systemic disruption. His argument is functional rather than speculative. For XRP to serve as a global settlement layer at scale, the token price would need to be high enough. That way, large dollar volumes can move without consuming a disproportionate share of supply and triggering the same slippage seen in the Gemini candle.
