I've been toying with the idea of XPP for awhile now. I have this FOMO thing going on in my head that I should get in now when I can accumulate a lot of tokens at its $1.30 - $1.35 price, sit on it and look at 10 years from now. I think XRP has too many maximum coins to ever do anything like Bitcoin did. But, I think most everyone thinks about where they'd be right now if they had, had a crystal ball 15-20 years ago and threw $5-10K at Bitcoin! Could XRP be that same thing, but on a smaller scale?
You'd be surprised by how much personal philosophy, worldview, and even ideology go into people's answers to questions like yours here, separate entirely from fundamentals and technicals.
@fmyth 's answer is pretty solid, but I'll add some more perspective here.
Short version yes or no with XRP?
YES.
When I look at cryptos, or any investment, the first and most important question I ask, is "What is the fundamental value this asset creates?", followed by, "Is that the same value-creation that is perceived by the majority of its investors?"
Bitcoin's primary value-creation is as a digital, encrypted store of value that can't be debased - it's a safe-haven, like gold. And its value is perceived in its price, directly. Either today's or future, expected prices. There are also a ton of different ideological camps within it, including ones that also value it for its "privacy", and governmental inability to fundamentally alter its nature. In terms of crypto though, it's also an older tech, and is limited in terms of speed and volume of transaction. Consequently, the majority of institutional investors aren't seeing it as a new currency, payment rail, or tool for tokenizing real-world assets - they're seeing it purely as a store of value, understood by its price. One that, year over year, also happens to trend over 70% in appreciation.
XRP's primary value creation is as an international bridge currency, a payment rail, and a tool for tokenizing real-world assets - all of which are fundamentally beyond what BTC can really do efficiently. XRP, like Bitcoin, also has a fixed amount that was produced, and no more will ever be produced. The only asterisk here, is not all of it has been released onto the market by Ripple - they're releasing tranches of it every month, for another 5-10 years or so, in theory. But the founders of Ripple
intentionally designed XRP from the beginning to literally replace the existing international finance system's value flows, and to put all existing financial tools onto their electronic system. Everything from stocks and bonds and titles of any kind, to money itself, being "tokenized" onto the encrypted blockchain system that keeps track of all this nearly at the speed of light - decentralized and survivable across the global internet. Stuff that's in hard-copy and moved at bankers' hours now, trading M-F 9-5, will be tokenized online and flowing for commerce 24/7/365.
There are two additional, exceedingly important things to recognize about XRP in all this. First, is that the more it's worth per token, the more utility it has for cross-border payments, especially high-value ones by institutions. It's a bit of a complicated topic, but payments and commerce with it at that level get a lot more efficient across markets and moments as the price of each token goes up (have Chat GPT explain "slippage" in the trading context, if you want more detail).
The second key thing is that relatively little of it is held by retail investors, or is available at any given time on exchanges - it's a shallow pool of availability. Big institutions have been gobbling it up for the past year or so, at rates just below that which would cause price or supply shocks. They know they have a limited window to accumulate at relatively nearly-nothing prices, and they're all in a bit of a mexican standoff with each other, not wanting to be the first to suddenly dump $10billion USD into XRP yet, and cause that price and supply shock to hit. Because once it does, the price isn't coming back down appreciably -
there will be too much utility in it as a high-value token. At the institutional level, their primary payoff isn't XRP going from $1.35 to $10,000 - their primary payoff is having large volumes of it that will
save them and profit billions of additional dollars each year just by using it over the existing payments system.
The value of the token going up is just a nice side benefit - per-token value is just icing on the cake.
These factors affecting the global financial system are what make XRP different from BTC.
XRP has that compounding value of per-coin value plus systemic utility of it being a high-value token. It's orders of magnitude more leverage.
BTC is going to continue to behave more like a commodity - like gold, people and institutions will continue to dump into it, but at a more linear rate. A very steep line, yes, but probably not more than 100% per year. Which is still insane compared to equities. But it just does not have that leveraged, compounding utility that XRP does, as a monetary unit, as a payments system, or as a tokenized ledger for real-world assets.
What XRP has not had, has been realized utility - the Biden administration essentially waged lawfare against crypto, with XRP as its primary whipping-boy, going through the courts. That kept institutions wary of adopting it, though hundreds have run test cases with it in preparation and evaluation. That lawfare really only wrapped up with this new administration in the last year or so, which dropped all actions against it without prejudice, and essentially just named it an 15 other cryptos as legally safe and properly regulated assets. It went from being something of an investment gray area, to being certified and approved.
XRP is only now getting going, and if you google what Ripple (it's parent company) has been doing just in the last year, you can see they're moving forward at light speed. It's shocking just how fast and strategically brilliant their various acquisitions and partnerships have been.
Sometime within the next year or so, we're going to experience a liquidity crisis globally - once that happens, institutions (including central banks) will not be able to waste time and locked up resources by doing business the old way, with SWIFT. There will be far too many advantages for each of them in rapidly switching over to XRP and its instant global payments - and a significant majority of the major ones, including a number of central banks, have already done pilot projects with XRP to test just that. They've got a switch they can flip at any time. The only question on how fast it will happen and to what degree over SWIFT, is in how sudden and severe any liquidity shortage is. Once that happens though, XRP's value growth will not be linear.
I have no idea what its high-end value will be a few years from now - but what I do know, is that there are incomprehensible sums of wealth incentive aligned for institutions to hold it at as high of a price as possible, far beyond the value of each coin. And those are forces I would never, ever bet against.
