CoinRoutes chief executive Dave Weisberger detonated a fresh round of anxiety in the XRP market on Monday when he asked, on Scott Melker’s podcast, whether Ripple Labs could finance a takeover of Circle “for $10 to $20 billion” without off-loading roughly $10 billion in XRP. “Who’s going to buy the $10 billion worth of XRP they would need to sell out of their treasury?” Weisberger said, warning that a sudden supply surge could overwhelm order books and “hammer the price.”
Is A XRP Sell-Off Conceivable?
Within hours, pro-XRP attorney Fred Rispoli fired back on X. “I love @daveweisberger1, but on this point he is mcgloning so hard,” he wrote, invoking Bloomberg strategist Mike McGlone’s reputation for bearish hyperbole. “Just based on what I’m getting offered for my Ripple shares on the secondary market, I don’t think Ripple would even have to sell one XRP to buy Circle.” Rispoli agreed that Ripple cannot raise $10 billion in pure cash, yet insisted the company could “easily afford the acquisition for a mix of cash and debt” and a heavy equity-swap.
When Weisberger replied that Circle’s board would likely demand hard dollars unless it accepted Ripple equity or XRP “without a haircut,” Rispoli dug in. “No way to get $10B in cash—and $10B is too high anyway,” he wrote, citing late-2024 private-research valuations that placed Ripple at $15 billion excluding its ~36 billion escrowed XRP. If Circle’s price tag fell to $7–9 billion, he said, Ripple could close with “$1–3 billion cash on hand, a heavy stock exchange, and debt,” especially with “all that GCC money sloshing around crypto world right now.” Rispoli conceded it would be “a reach” but “doable without meaningfully selling XRP.”
Weisberger acknowledged the math—“That’s a reasonable analysis,” he wrote—yet cautioned that any price at the upper end of Rispoli’s range “could be some short-term pain for us XRP holders.”
Ripple’s tender-offer buyback in January 2024 valued the company at $11.3 billion, disclosing more than $1 billion in cash and about $25 billion in digital assets—mostly XRP—on its books. The firm still controls roughly 52 billion XRP (about 40 percent of supply), though 36 billion sit in timed escrow releases, limiting immediate access. At today’s $2.20 spot price, the spendable portion is worth a little under $35 billion, but moving even a fraction quickly would collide with thin venue depth—a point Weisberger hammered home.
Ripple’s cash pile also shrank after its $1.25 billion purchase of prime broker Hidden Road in April, a deal settled with a blend of cash, equity and RLUSD stablecoins. That acquisition suggests the company prefers hybrid structures, bolstering Rispoli’s claim that Treasury XRP need not flood the market.
Is Circle Even For Sale?
The debate may be academic. Circle, issuer of USDC, has repeatedly declared it “not for sale” while marching toward a New York Stock Exchange listing that now targets a $7.2 billion valuation. Ripple’s rumored approach earlier this spring reportedly topped $5 billion, well below Weisberger’s stress case and within Rispoli’s “doable” band, but Circle rebuffed the talks and updated its S-1 two weeks later, enlarging the float rather than seeking a buyer.
Strategically, Ripple already fields its own dollar-token RLUSD, launched in January and positioned by president Monica Long as “complementary to XRP, not a competitor.” Absorbing USDC’s issuer would instantly rocket Ripple towards the size of Tether.
Even under Rispoli’s optimistic structure, Ripple might still need to liquidate several hundred million dollars’ worth of XRP for working capital and closing costs. At current volumes, unloading just 500 million XRP (≈ $1.1 billion) would equal half a week of global turnover—enough to distort price unless executed as private blocks.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.19.
