Joel Katz's Take: Why the XRP Market Isn't Buying the $100 Story

The $100 XRP price target resurfaces with predictable regularity, especially during bull runs. It sounds compelling on social media. It sounds inevitable in certain corners of the community. But David Schwartz—better known by his longtime pseudonym Joel Katz in crypto circles—cuts through the noise with an observation that most market participants conveniently ignore. His argument strips away emotion and replaces it with basic probability theory and how capital actually behaves when people believe in something.

The Core Problem: Market Signals Don’t Match the Narrative

Joel Katz lays out a straightforward logical test. If a significant portion of rational investors genuinely believed there was even a 10% probability that XRP would hit $100 within a few years, today’s market structure would look completely different. Think about it: with XRP currently trading at $1.41 as of mid-February 2026, the math would be obvious to anyone with conviction in that thesis. Sellers holding below $10 would face immediate competition. Aggressive buyers with real capital behind their belief would systematically clear supply at those levels. The price would not remain this stable if serious money genuinely expected a tenfold-plus move.

Yet that’s precisely what is not happening.

Where Price Discovery Actually Lives

The gap between what market participants publicly advocate and what they actually do with their capital is where true price discovery occurs. Someone can post threads about XRP hitting $100. They can sound confident in interviews. They can build narratives that fit perfectly into bullish technical setups. But if those same people are not aggressively accumulating at $1-$3 range, their stated conviction is questionable. Markets don’t lie when actual money enters or exits. The current price reflects a collective assessment that extreme upside scenarios carry lower probability weightings than bull case rhetoric suggests.

Joel Katz’s position here is neither defensive nor emotional. It’s grounded in how free markets actually function. When millions of participants make daily allocation decisions with real capital, the resulting price becomes a probability-weighted average of all those individual convictions. It’s messy, but it’s remarkably rational over time.

Rationality vs. Randomness: What the Market Actually Prices In

Schwartz also challenges the popular assumption that cryptocurrency prices are mostly irrational chaos punctuated by manipulation. His view: most prices stay reasonably rational most of the time. Markets continuously balance multiple competing factors—upside potential against regulatory risk, adoption timelines against competitive threats, tokenization benefits against implementation uncertainty.

The massive bull runs that do occur typically emerge from events nobody predicted in advance. Macro shocks. Regulatory breakthroughs. Structural shifts in how institutions allocate capital. These catalysts are unpredictable by nature, which is precisely why they move markets.

For XRP specifically, much of the future valuation equation still depends on externalities outside Ripple’s direct control. Will payment adoption accelerate at enterprise scale? Will central banks and institutions embrace XRPL settlement for cross-border transfers? Will regulatory clarity improve sufficiently to unlock institutional participation? None of these developments follow a predictable calendar, and markets price that genuine uncertainty into every quote.

XRPL’s Utility Remains Steady—But Doesn’t Guarantee a Moon Shot

One consistent element amid the volatility: XRPL’s fundamental purpose hasn’t changed. Payments. Settlement. Asset exchange. That infrastructure continues functioning regardless of price debates or social media sentiment. The network’s core utility is real and operational.

But utility alone doesn’t force a $100 valuation. Markets demand proof of adoption at scale before assigning those premiums. They reward potential, sure—but they verify it slowly.

The Bottom Line: Markets Are Voting, Not Sleeping

Joel Katz’s framework is uncomfortable for extreme bulls because it directly challenges price-target narratives. But it’s rooted in observable market mechanics. Price isn’t a promise or a prophecy. It’s the outcome of millions of probability estimates, updated continuously, weighted by the capital behind each conviction.

Anyone can run the math themselves. Adjust the target. Adjust the probability. Adjust the timeframe. Most reasonable scenarios land in similar territory: the market has priced in genuine uncertainty about massive upside, and current levels reflect that pricing. The market isn’t asleep. It’s actively voting with capital every day. Right now, that vote says the path to $100 remains highly unlikely in any reasonable timeframe. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible—just that serious market participants aren’t behaving as though they believe it’s probable.