Key Points

• Ethereum will almost certainly be around in 10 years.

• The odds are very good that it will be worth a lot more at that point than it is today.

• That doesn't mean its moonshot potential is going to unfold perfectly.

• These 10 stocks could mint the next wave of millionaires ›

Building a skyscraper starts with a blueprint that looks bold on paper, but it takes more than an architect's sketches for the plan to become a reality. The same applies to the ever-popular dream of turning a modest investment in a cryptocurrency like Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) into a seven-figure stake.

Making $1 million with this coin will demand aggressive price appreciation, unwavering discipline, and a healthy tolerance for volatility, not to mention for its roadmap to play out as conceived and then subsequently be well received by the market. Ready to see exactly what it would take?

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Crunching the numbers

Let's start by envisioning the finish line.

Today, the coin trades at about $3,600. Assume Ethereum coins change hands at $30,000 in mid-2035, which would make for roughly an eightfold gain. That likely would require the network to capture a dominant share of the capital related to decentralized finance (DeFi), tokenized assets, and artificial intelligence (AI)-native blockchain applications. Furthermore, at that price, you would need about 33.4 tokens to crest the $1 million mark.

Buying that much over 10 years at an average price of $5,000 would cost roughly $167,000, or about $1,391 per month.

Most investors cannot afford to allocate that much to one fairly risky investment on a monthly basis, but it might still be possible by siphoning some of the regular flows of capital devoted to buying safer investments, as inadvisable as that may be. Importantly, those numbers shrink a bit if the purchased coins are staked consistently; some validators currently offer staking yields near 4%, and there are some Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that now pass on staking rewards to shareholders.

The math here has three pillars.

First, the future price. A $60,000 end price cuts the amount of coins needed in half, and it slashes the monthly purchasing requirement to about $700, which is more manageable. Alternatively, a much lower price would make the entire endeavor financially impractical.

Second is the average purchase price. A nasty bear market could drop your average cost far below today's level, or a melt-up could push it sharply higher.

The third pillar is your own consistency. If you miss a few months of buying, the entire plan starts to wobble fast.

None of those pillars are guaranteed to hold, so investors must treat this projection as a best guess, not a promise.

The assumptions carry a lot of load here

Now that we have a few rough figures pinned down, it's time to vet the assumptions that underlie the chain's prospects for growth.

Ethereum's dominance of the decentralized finance sector looks fairly sturdy today, though not quite as unassailable as it did in 2021, and even less so compared to its strength in 2017. It hosts roughly $80 billion of the DeFi sector's $134 billion in total value locked (TVL), which is good for a market share of about 60%. If that share persists while the sector triples, the network's fee revenue, and by extension its staking rewards, would doubtlessly swell.

Meanwhile, the broader smart contracts market is projected by Research and Markets to grow at a 23% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2029 as more industries automate processes on-chain. It's practically a given that Ethereum will continue to capture a big share of that market, and AI agents that write, audit, and trigger smart contracts could juice growth even further.

Evolving regulation rounds out the bullish case.

A May 29 statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) signaled a path for staking to remain legal when offered through registered intermediaries. Coupled with the first wave of ETFs, financial institutions finally have a compliance-friendly way to hold and compound Ethereum, which they are now starting to do.

So, at least on the surface, Ethereum has a decent chance of being able to grow quickly enough to meet the requirements for investors to become millionaires during the next decade, provided they continuously invest some capital on a regular basis.

This is not a slam dunk in any way

Now for the cracks in the mirror.

Rival smart contract chains like Solana offer lower fees and faster transaction speeds. They're also courting developers, both of which could chip away at Ethereum's market share and, in time, potentially supplant it entirely. And while U.S. regulators appear friendlier today, policy shifts can arrive overnight. Any one of these shocks could flatten staking yields, stunt price growth, or both, stretching the $1 million timeline well past 10 years.

Therefore, aiming to amass $1 million in Ethereum within a decade is possible on paper, but it relies on a stack of optimistic assumptions that are not very sturdy. The base case here won't get most investors to the million-dollar mark with a reasonable amount of investing over time, even if it will likely make them significantly richer.

Most investors will be better served by stretching the time horizon out, lowering the monthly contribution to a level that will not tempt them to bail during a crash, and letting the network's slower, steadier growth do the heavy lifting during the next 15 or 20 years instead.

Where to invest $1,000 right now

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*Stock Advisor returns as of August 4, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Key Points

• Bitcoin's price doesn't move in a vacuum.

• The global money supply is a key driver of its growth or lack thereof.

• The strength of the U.S. dollar is also a very important factor to consider.

• 10 stocks we like better than Bitcoin ›

Markets are full of complicated gauges, but sometimes the simplest ones deliver the cleanest signal. Right now, the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) is sliding while the global M2 money supply is swelling, and those two shifts have historically been rocket fuel for crypto assets, particularly Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC).

At roughly $118,000 per coin, up about 29% so far this year, Bitcoin sits at an inflection point where fresh liquidity and a softer dollar could converge into a powerful updraft, doubling it from here. Understanding these two indicators is key to predicting what might happen next.

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As the dollar sags, Bitcoin runs

Across Bitcoin's 16-year history, pronounced dollar weakness has usually coincided with strong upside for the coin.

As fate would have it, the DXY -- which measures the value of the U.S. dollar against a basket of foreign currencies -- recently printed its deepest dive below its 200-day moving average in 21 years, precisely as Bitcoin is climbing to touch its all-time highs.

In every major crypto bull cycle, like 2013, 2017, and 2021, a falling value of DXY preceded or paralleled Bitcoin's advance. The mechanism is straightforward. As the greenback loses purchasing power, investors hunt for scarce, nonsovereign assets that can hold value across borders, like gold (which is at a high-water mark as well) and like Bitcoin.

Dollar softness may not be transitory this time around. There could be a couple of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve before the end of 2025, signaling easier monetary policy ahead. A cheaper dollar, combined with a shrinking pool of newly minted Bitcoin courtesy of its halving in 2024, will tighten the supply-and-demand vise in favor of Bitcoin holders even further.

Still, correlation is not destiny. During prior pivots to risk-off periods, both Bitcoin and the dollar have fallen together. However, short-term dislocations aside, a persistently weaker DXY tilts the long-term odds toward higher Bitcoin prices.

The global money supply is expanding again

While the dollar stumbles, the total pool of money sloshing around the world just hit an all-time high.

The global M2 money supply indicator, which counts cash plus liquid deposits across the 21 largest central banks, climbed to $55.5 trillion in July, reclaiming the growth trend that paused in 2023.

That matters because Bitcoin historically tracks M2 growth with a loose but meaningful correlation. When liquidity accelerates, investors have more capital to deploy into scarce assets, and Bitcoin's hard cap of 21 million coins makes it an obvious candidate on that front.

Central banks are also greasing the wheels here. India's Reserve Bank has already slashed its repo rate and cut its reserve requirements to inject cash into markets. China's central bank has committed to a fairly loose stance, preparing further liquidity injections to shore up demand domestically. Those moves echo shifts at other major central banks and point to a broad, synchronized easing cycle which will send the money supply even higher.

Assuming Bitcoin simply maintains its historical elasticity to rising liquidity, a 1% jump in global M2 growth has often translated into 65% or higher returns for the coin within the following 12 to 18 months. Starting from today's $118,000 price tag, even a conservative reading of that relationship suggests a doubling toward $240,000 is thus feasible on the basis of the M2's recent expansion, though not guaranteed.

What investors should consider

The past can't predict the future, and while I'm optimistic about these money moves pushing Bitcoin drastically higher, investors should remember that more money supply can stoke inflation, prompt surprise rate hikes, or flow into entirely different asset classes. Still, with the dollar on the back foot and central banks printing money again, Bitcoin looks unusually well positioned, and it could well double from here.

Should you invest $1,000 in Bitcoin right now?

Before you buy stock in Bitcoin, consider this:

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Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $624,823!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,064,820!*

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*Stock Advisor returns as of July 29, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Key Points

• Many asset managers are migrating their assets to be tracked by blockchains.

• Both Solana and XRP stand to capture inflows related to this migration.

• But, at least so far, they're excelling in very different classes of tokenized assets.

• 10 stocks we like better than XRP ›

Smart investors know that you don't need to swing at every pitch. Sometimes, simply parking a modest sum in the right play before the crowd arrives can reap outsize rewards. A fast-maturing corner of crypto -- real-world asset (RWA) tokenization -- offers that setup today as it moves stocks, bonds, and other traditional instruments onto blockchains for cheaper, faster settlement compared to existing financial technologies.

Two coins already capturing some of the capital flows related to tokenization are Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) and XRP (CRYPTO: XRP). They approach the megatrend of asset tokenization slightly differently, giving investors a paired bet on whatever flavors of tokenized finance proliferate next. Even a relatively modest investment of $1,500 could be intelligently allocated into either of these two coins, so let's investigate both. And I suggest holding for at least three years.

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This chain is a speed specialist

Solana's chief selling points are its throughput and its cheapness.

The network routinely clears more than 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) at sub-penny fees, letting developers iterate without worrying that usage spikes will crush users' wallets. That has proved invaluable for tokenized stocks. After a platform called xStocks launched on the chain in late May, the value of stock tokens on Solana tripled to about $48 million within three weeks; as of late July, the chain's tokenized stocks are worth more than $102 million.

Zoom out, and the corpus of tokenized assets on Solana now stands near $553 million, up by more than 218% this year alone, which is more than double the sector's overall growth.

The chain is thus emerging as a natural magnet for asset issuers experimenting with tech that's beyond their traditional venues.

If Boston Consulting Group's projection that the sum of tokenized real-world assets will reach $16 trillion by 2030 is even half-right, a rising tide of assets would keep nudging validators to lock up Solana for staking, tightening supply. Furthermore, asset issuers will need to buy and hold the coin to manage their tokens, not to mention parking at least some of their fiat currency on the chain as stablecoins.

Regulatory surprises remain the main risk here, as tokenized stocks and funds live in (partially) uncharted territory. But, that risk seems likely going to get resolved within the next few years thanks to new leadership at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and when it does, the chain would pick up a new tailwind in the form of regulatory clarity.

Buying $1,500 worth of Solana and holding it through then is thus a favorable course of action.

This institutional plumber is carving a compliance moat

Where Solana thrives on raw speed, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) is a money transfer and asset-tracking system that embeds the (boring but essential) features banks actually ask for, like account freezing tools, native blacklisting, and built-in identity layers that satisfy know-your-customer (KYC) rules without the need to bolt on third-party widgets. Those controls are attracting issuers of regulated debt and payment instruments, which are the (once again, boring but essential) enormous backbone of finance.

XRP now has roughly $133 million in tokenized assets on its chain, up from under $50 million a year ago. That footprint is small compared to other chains like Ethereum, but its composition skews toward institutional debt rather than stocks. Every new bond or payment token minted consumes XRP for fees, subtly trimming float and sharpening its scarcity narrative.

Whereas one of Solana's strong points so far has been with tokenized stocks, XRP's advantage at the moment is in its deeply liquid tokenized U.S. Treasury bill platform, worth $75.2 million, which is something that banks and other financial institutions need. When those players use XRP as part of their financial back end, they gain a significant advantage from being able to tap into borrowing those Treasuries natively on-chain. Furthermore, the ledger's tight compliance posture also reduces headline risk, as institutions can adopt the coin without cobbling together legal patchwork like they'd need to do with Ethereum-based solutions.

Of course, the chain relies entirely on the business development muscle of Ripple, the business which issues XRP. Should legal or strategic missteps slow institutional partner onboarding, the coin's growth would stall. Still, the chain's design speaks the language of regulators, which is a competitive advantage that compounds as rules tighten worldwide and as larger players (with heftier compliance requirements) enter the crypto space.

Over the coming years, as institutions pile into crypto to take advantage of its technology, few chains are better positioned than XRP. And that's why it's worth buying with $1,500 today, and holding for at least three years.

Should you invest $1,000 in XRP right now?

Before you buy stock in XRP, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and XRP wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $636,628!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,063,471!*

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*Stock Advisor returns as of July 21, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Key Points

• It's now possible to trade certain stocks on Solana's blockchain.

• That capability is attracting a lot of capital, and very quickly.

• You don't necessarily want to be investing in these tokenized assets just yet.

• 10 stocks we like better than Solana ›

Wall Street's market closes at 4 p.m. eastern time, but blockchains are open all night long. Thanks in part due to that after‑hours void, a tiny slice of the stock market has quietly migrated onto Solana (CRYPTO: SOL), turning a small but growing selection of stocks into tokens that trade 24/7.

Between mid‑June and July 4, Solana's on‑chain value of those tokenized stocks more than tripled, from about $13 million to $48 million, a jump powered almost entirely by a new platform called xStocks. By July 16, the chain featured more than $100 million worth of stocks, indicating that the pace of growth is still incredible.

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The quantity of dollars involved here might look trivial, but the growth rate is anything but. Let's dig into why this is happening, and what it could mean for long‑term investors in Solana and other cryptocurrencies.

Stock tokenization just went white-hot

The xStocks platform went live on June 30 with more than 60 U.S. tickers set up. This included companies you might own, like Microsoft, Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and more, all minted as a Solana token and tradable on major crypto exchanges like Kraken, Bybit, and several decentralized exchanges (DEXes) too.

Those tokens are said to be backed 1‑for‑1 by shares of the underlying stocks. Transactions settle in seconds, and they can move peer‑to‑peer at sub‑penny network fees. They can also be traded at any hour of the day or night, which is an experience most brokerage apps simply cannot match.

Speed and novelty explain part of the surge, but the quality of the technology enabling the move matters too.

Solana's cheap and fast transactions make sending fractional shares around the network highly economical, which in turn invites small investors, and also the development of relatively small-time decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that cater to that same group. The launch also coincided with the launch of so‑called "tax coins," an emerging segment of tokens that skim a trading levy and automatically funnel the proceeds into xStocks to distribute to holders as on‑chain dividends. Further DeFi innovation involving tokenized assets like stocks is all but guaranteed, and at the moment, Solana is where it all happens.

But before you rush in and buy tokenized stocks on Solana, be aware that there is a substantial amount of fine print here.

Liquidity is razor‑thin on tokenized stocks in a way that most investors never need to think about normally. Many xStocks trade only a few thousand dollars a day, so the risk of your purchases or sales failing due to insufficient liquidity is significant in some cases.

Furthermore, most tokenized stocks still fall under securities laws, no matter what wrapper they wear. If there are issues with regulators, platforms could be forced to delist assets or exclude U.S. users overnight, and that might make the tokenized stocks worthless or untradeable.

What this means for holders

Tokenized stocks are only one strand of Solana's real‑world asset (RWA) push, but they arrive as the chain is already outpacing rivals.

Total RWA value on Solana, which includes everything from U.S. Treasuries to funds, has surged 140% this year to reach roughly $564 million as of mid-July. If that trend holds, Solana could capture a meaningful share of the trillions in assets that consultants expect to go on‑chain by 2030. For reference, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) pegs the total addressable market for tokenized illiquid assets at about $16 trillion within five years.

For holders, the mechanics of how to benefit from this trend are very straightforward. Every stock transfer or dividend a smart contract triggers in turn burns a smidge of the coin in fees, tightening supply. It also implies that users and investors had to hold some of the coin to pay the fees. In theory, a booming stock token venue could replicate what meme coins did for Solana's fee revenue last winter, but with Wall Street credibility attached.

Investors intrigued by this development should consider two things.

First, as far as the tokenized stocks themselves go, you don't need to rush to buy them. If you're the average investor, you probably shouldn't be buying them at all for at least a few more quarters to let the open issues get settled. Just buy the stocks on the traditional equity market as you usually do, assuming you want to hold them at all.

Second, if you believe public stocks will migrate on‑chain in size and that Solana's speed will keep it competitive, buying and holding the coin for the long haul will give you exposure to the upside from that trend.

In short, the explosion of stock tokenization on the chain is quite bullish, and it's ensuring that Solana's long-term picture keeps looking better and better.

Should you invest $1,000 in Solana right now?

Before you buy stock in Solana, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Solana wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $652,133!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,056,790!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 1,048% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of July 15, 2025

Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Alex Carchidi has positions in Amazon, Meta Platforms, Nvidia, Solana, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, Solana, and Tesla. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Key Points

• XRP is seeing good uptake among banks and large investing groups.

• Strategy's unique approach to buying Bitcoin is delivering leveraged returns.

• One of these assets is more likely to keep you up at night than the other.

• 10 stocks we like better than XRP ›

XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) and MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) both soared during crypto's 2025 revival, with the fintech coin rising by 46% and the crypto treasury company climbing by 49% this year so far (as of July 18).

Yet one earns its keep by processing real transactions for banks and institutions, while the other is a listed company whose sole trick is piling more Bitcoin onto an already mountainous stack.

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But which route is going to lead to higher returns for investors with a moderately sized amount of starting capital to invest -- say, $5,000?

XRP is building utility today, and it's working

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) is gradually turning into an institutional finance support layer as a result of the consistent development work performed by its issuing company, Ripple.

Last month, Ripple and Circle ported Circle's stablecoin onto the XRPL to grease the wheels of on‑chain payments for users in the traditional financial sector, as well as for the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector. The overarching strategy here is to beef up the chain's platforms for stablecoins, tokenized U.S. Treasuries, and other real-world assets (RWAs), and then build out the compliance and identity-tracking features that banks and asset managers crave. The idea is that once the financial and regulatory infrastructure is in good condition, the target users will be heavily incentivized to show up because there aren't other blockchains that are as carefully tailored to their particular needs.

Why does that matter for those considering an investment in XRP?

Each ledger transfer requires a sliver of XRP crypto that is permanently burned upon the transaction's completion. The busier the network, the scarcer the coin becomes. If stablecoin liquidity and real-world asset settlement grow in volume, demand for fees and for escrow collateral should keep pace, creating a modest-to-moderate upward pressure on the coin's price.

Legal overhang is fading too, which lowers the risk of making an investment now.

In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) signaled that it would abandon its appeal in its long-running lawsuit against Ripple, effectively ending a four‑year skirmish that once scared away institutions and a number of rightly cautious investors. Regulatory clarity doesn't directly feed through into short-term price appreciation, but it takes away the largest known tripwire for adoption, so it removes a significant drag on the asset's long-term potential.

Strategy is a levered bet on Bitcoin

Strategy is the corporate embodiment of the stereotypical diehard Bitcoin evangelical (some would say cultist) crowd. This means that it's all about buying as much Bitcoin as it can possibly afford, including by issuing new stock and taking out fresh debt, regardless of the coin's price.

As of July 14, it held about 601,550 bitcoins, purchased for $42.9 billion at an average cost of $71,268 each. At today's Bitcoin price of about $119,000, that holding is worth roughly $72 billion.

To expand the stack, management keeps issuing zero‑coupon convertible notes, including another $2  billion in February alone. It's going to continue in this same pattern until the cows come home.

For shareholders, that has paid off fairly well during the past five years.

MSTR data by YCharts.

Investors must understand that leverage supercharges Strategy's stock returns if Bitcoin rises, but it also magnifies pain. A 25% slide in the big orange coin would erase a vast amount of the company's value.

There's also a subtle timing mismatch. Strategy's convertible bonds mature years from now, starting in 2030, but historically, Bitcoin has shown that it can drop significantly in days and weeks. Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor's conviction in the asset is legendary, but conviction doesn't repay debtors.

Finally, remember that Strategy is not Bitcoin -- there are actually a few ancillary activities the company still does related to its former identity as a software business. In other words, you're paying for its overhead in the name of getting exposure to Bitcoin, which you could replicate more cleanly with holding the coin itself.

Where $5,000 probably works harder

If your goal is to capture some upside in the crypto sector while taking on a moderate amount of risk, XRP looks like the preferable bet here.

The ledger is luring real revenue sources, like stablecoin float, cross‑border payment settlement, and tokenized treasuries, all while its biggest legal cloud just cleared. Assuming Ripple hits its roadmap milestones, institutional demand could continue to increase sharply during the next few years, sending XRP's price higher. It might not be a wealth-maker investment overnight, but the risk of a big implosion feels lower than during the lawsuit era, and it's undeniably finding traction right where it wants to.

Strategy is more of a racehorse for adrenaline seekers, which is to say that it's not a great play for the average investor. Should Bitcoin sprint to $200,000 by 2026, the stock's leverage could make XRP's gains look small. Yet that same leverage could become very cruel for shareholders if Bitcoin revisits $60,000, a level that would wipe out a huge chunk of the company's balance sheet and trigger harsh volatility. Most mainstream investors do not need that kind of insomnia-provoking asset in a retirement portfolio.

Therefore, for a $5,000 allocation today, XRP is the better option. Leave Strategy for those comfortable underwriting both Bitcoin's swings and a heavily indebted software company that moonlights as a crypto hedge fund.

Should you invest $1,000 in XRP right now?

Before you buy stock in XRP, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and XRP wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $652,133!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,056,790!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 1,048% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of July 15, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin and Circle Internet Group. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Key Points

• Market bubbles can form when macroeconomic and industry trends combine.

• Cryptocurrency's last big bubble was in 2021.

• It is reasonable to wonder whether crypto is in a bubble right now.

• 10 stocks we like better than Bitcoin ›

Markets love a juicy narrative, and "crypto bubble 2.0" is certainly juicy. Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) sits near $117,000, only a whisker from its all-time high set July 10, while big altcoins, such as Solana (CRYPTO: SOL), Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), and XRP (CRYPTO: XRP), have doubled or better since mid-2023. Yet bubble talk is cheap. History punishes investors who sell first and ask questions later, so it pays to look under the hood before slapping the B-word on today's rally.

Let's unpack why prices are higher, why the mood is nothing like the euphoria of 2021, and what that means for long-term investors. If you pay careful attention here, it just might save you from timing mistakes that haunt your portfolio for years.

Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue »

Fundamentals are in line with pricing

A bubble, by definition, is a price divorced from fundamentals. That diagnosis is tricky in crypto because fundamentals evolve fast, but a few data points stand out.

First, demand in the sector is now predominantly institutional, not retail. U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have sucked in roughly $50 billion since launching 18 months ago. Those coins are locked away in cold storage for a steady trickle of staking fee income, which is hardly the stuff of manic speculation.

Second, the macro backdrop is set to improve rather than worsen. The Federal Reserve held its benchmark interest rate steady in June but penciled in two cuts before the end of the year, with potentially more to follow in 2026. Looser monetary policy historically expands the money supply and the risk appetite, which is exactly what happened during the last big crypto bubble in 2021. If cuts arrive on schedule, crypto could enjoy a liquidity tailwind that was absent during 2022's wipeout.

Third, utility on leading chains is finally visible, which is to say there's a concrete reason to buy the native tokens of those chains. Solana's weekly network fees and its application revenue are surging to new highs -- people are using its decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, and platform operators are generating money as a result.

XRP's ledger, meanwhile, is onboarding tokenized U.S. Treasuries and bank-friendly compliance tools, making it a more attractive home for institutional capital. That fee and transaction revenue is small in absolute terms, but it proves that these coins are being bought to pave the way for real workloads, not just speculation.

Separately from the above, one thing that people tend to be curious about is how meme coins fit into the picture. Yes, meme coins exist, and they still spike to silly valuations of $1 billion or more. However, the entire meme coin cohort is currently valued at only $64.1 billion, just a smidgen of crypto's $3.7 trillion total market capitalization.

And it isn't as though new meme stars are emerging every day in a way that captures attention outside of the limited circles of crypto insiders.

Classic bubble signals aren't even present

When the market is at its euphoric peaks, there are many tell-tale signs, ranging from soaring retail inflows to sky-high use of leverage and nearly incessant dinner table chatter from people who don't usually invest. None of those are flashing red today.

Start with sentiment. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index, offered by CoinMarketCap, reads 67 ("greed"), well below the 90-plus extremes logged in early 2021 and late 2024. Greed is in control at this moment, yes, but it's hardly mania by historical standards.

Web search interest tells a similar story. Searches for "Bitcoin" remain near six-month lows even as its price grinds higher, indicating that newcomers are not piling in en masse. Other signals, like the app store ranking of crypto wallet and trading apps, also look ice cold.

On-chain data is equally sober. Glassnode, a crypto data provider, calculates that a "super majority" of holders sit on unrealized profits after Bitcoin's rebound past $107,000. This implies that there could be some profit-taking in store, but also that almost nobody is under pressure to sell.

Furthermore, leverage in derivatives markets sits well below 2021 peaks. The odds of a liquidation spiral sending the price downward are low.

Could sentiment overheat relatively soon? Absolutely.

The macroeconomic tailwinds look quite favorable for the entire crypto sector right now, as does government policy, and as does monetary policy in the near term. And with institutional capital piling in, a lot could happen to ignite super-positive sentiment as soon as this fall.

But for now, no crypto traders are flashing their newly purchased Lamborghinis on social media. Nor are the valuations of most of the crypto majors overextended compared to 2021. So, don't get scared out of the market by talk of a bubble.

In sum, the data indicates that we are in a warm but far from overheated market. Keep an eye on the key indicators so that you will be ahead of the game if they start to signal too much froth.

Should you invest $1,000 in Bitcoin right now?

Before you buy stock in Bitcoin, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Bitcoin wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $671,477!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,010,880!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 1,047% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of July 7, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Key Points

• Chainlink just initiated a new and fully automated regulatory compliance engine.

• One of XRP's big appeals to institutional capital holders is its compliance tooling.

• Chainlink isn't about to eat XRP's lunch.

• 10 stocks we like better than XRP ›

When the U.S. railroads finally agreed on a common track gauge, freight stopped piling up at state borders, and rail commerce exploded. In tokenized cryptofinance, compliance tooling is the gauge. If an asset can roll from a private crypto wallet and onto a public blockchain without getting derailed by compliance problems, big volumes of capital will subsequently flow.

Enter Chainlink, (CRYPTO: LINK) the data oracle heavyweight that's now launching a suite of fresh compliance tools that could end up setting the standard for the industry for applications of its type. Given XRP's (CRYPTO: XRP) focus on being compliant for institutional investors, it's natural for some investors to suspect that Chainlink's new feature set poses a threat to XRP's market share.

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But this worry is misplaced. Here's why.

What Chainlink actually does

Chainlink is middleware. As a data oracle, its node operators send price quotes, logs of corporate actions, and proof-of-reserve confirmations into smart contracts on dozens of blockchains. The idea is for users and applications on those blockchains to use Chainlink's oracle for their own purposes, like automated trading or dynamic alteration of smart contracts. Roughly $45.1 billion in on-chain value depends on those feeds every day, which is more than any other oracle provider.

Because it sits between data producers and blockchains, Chainlink can bolt on new services without rewriting any ledger. Its newly launched Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) is just another module, which is to say it's optional code that token issuers can call to screen their counterparts or flag suspicious flows.

Chainlink doesn't settle transactions or hold custody of assets. It does not mint tokens, finalize ownership, or warehouse balances. Think of it as the Bloomberg terminal of crypto, rather than as a trading clearinghouse.

That design means it can enhance almost any ledger, including the XRP Ledger (XRPL), without competing for the same transaction volume or capital. In theory, an issuer could rely on Chainlink data and its new automated compliance logic, yet still move money across XRP's chain, paying XRP fees along the way.

Oracle and settlement layers are complementary, not substitute goods.

So, while there probably won't be a significant effect on XRP's price today, Chainlink's new compliance tooling could actually be helpful rather than harmful. Institutional investors on the XRPL now have access to a compliant-by-default data oracle, as XRPL doesn't provide one natively.

This issue is foundational to the future of crypto

Chainlink's launch of ACE is bullish for the crypto sector as a whole, as compliance is one of its most frequent stumbling blocks to broader institutional adoption.

Regulators from Singapore to Brussels spent the past year tightening crypto disclosure and identity rules, warning that tokenization cannot scale without bulletproof know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) capabilities. That makes compliance architecture the single biggest gating factor between the $25.3 billion of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) on public chains today and the trillions of assets that consultants expect to be managed on the blockchain within a decade. Many estimates call for the total value of tokenized real-world assets to reach trillions of dollars in the next five years, so it's a key segment for chains to compete in.

XRP tackles the problem at protocol level. The company that issues XRP, Ripple, is intent on making the chain the preferred solution for banks and institutional investors to transfer their money, process payments, settle trades, and track their tokenized assets.

As a result, on XRPL, tokenized asset issuers can exclude wallets, freeze rogue balances, and even halt an entire asset class if regulators demand it. Those controls are native, which means that no smart contracts are required, and Ripple's enterprise sales force markets them hard to banks that loathe stitching together third-party widgets.

There is plenty of runway for XRP to gain in value as a result of its leadership in compliance for real assets. Many of the same tailwinds it's experiencing will likely benefit Chainlink too.

XRP hosts about $160.2 million in tokenized assets today, up 37% in the past month but still just 0.6% of the public total. Chainlink's oracles, meanwhile, secure assets worth more than 300 times that amount, yet don't hold a single token themselves.

The pie is expanding quickly, which means that the capital wielded by institutional investors will be hunting for the cleanest ways to get on-chain data to enable their tokenized asset investments and operations. The bottom line here is that compliance is mandatory, but it is not winner-take-all. There are many different and non-overlapping niches, as well as many different investment opportunities.

Chainlink funnels truth and rule checks into contracts, whereas XRP provides a settlement layer with regulator-friendly throttles. Both are providing needed services, and both coins are probably worth buying and holding if you're the kind of investor who can normally stomach investing in altcoins.

Should you invest $1,000 in XRP right now?

Before you buy stock in XRP, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and XRP wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $671,477!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,010,880!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 1,047% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of July 7, 2025

Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Chainlink and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Key Points

• Solana is seeing a lot of users actually using its chain for what it was intended to do.

• That's driving money to the chain itself, as well as into its app ecosystem.

• Its competitors aren't anywhere near it in terms of how much cash their apps bring in.

• 10 stocks we like better than Solana ›

Would you want to invest in a store that gets a lot of paying customers, or one that doesn't? The same principle applies to blockchains, as the chains that collect the most fees are the ones people actually use.

Right now the busiest store is Solana, (CRYPTO: SOL) which has raked in more protocol revenue than any other network for three straight quarters and counting. Furthermore, at roughly $150 per coin, its market still prices it like an also-ran rather than a star player. That mismatch between cash coming in and price going out is why I think the token can top $500 within five years.

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Network revenue and app revenue are winning the day

Let's clarify two very important concepts for evaluating cryptocurrencies like Solana: Network revenue, and application revenue.

Network revenue is simply the sum of fees users pay to get their transactions registered into a block on the chain. Application revenue, on the other hand, is the sum total of revenue generated by the applications running on a chain.

High network and app revenue means heavy activity, in the form of decentralized finance (DeFi) swaps, non-fungible token (NFT) mints, payments for services, and borrowing or lending flows. In the 24 hours leading up to July 8, Solana brought in $1.3 million in network revenue, and its app ecosystem brought in $8.6 million, vastly outclassing all of its competitors by a large margin.

This streak has been accelerating in the most recent quarter. Solana booked more than $571 million in app revenue in second-quarter 2025, leaving Ethereum's $200 million in the dust. Daily snapshots tell the same story. On July 6, Solana captured almost half of all layer 1 (L1) and layer 2 (L2) network earnings worldwide.

Why do users keep piling in? Start with transaction costs and speed.

A typical Solana transaction costs about $0.00025 and settles in a couple of seconds, compared with Ethereum's multi-dollar gas bills that arrive fashionably late. Those economics make Solana the chain of choice for high-frequency decentralized exchange (DEX) trading, driving 46% of all decentralized-app revenue across crypto last quarter.

App developers follow the money, as they won't get paid otherwise. On that front, more than 7,600 new builders joined the ecosystem in 2024, the fastest growth in the sector by far. A bigger dev base seeds more apps, which beget more users, which inflate revenue, making the Solana flywheel exactly what Ethereum pioneered but is now struggling to maintain.

Taken together, nine months of revenue leadership signal that Solana owns the most vibrant storefront in crypto. Next comes turning that cash register ring into price appreciation, which will take time.

The path to $500 is very plausible from here

Given the above, the odds of Solana growing significantly over the coming years are fairly favorable.

Hitting a target of $500 from $152 requires a 229% climb, or roughly a 3.3x return from where the coin is today.

That sounds heroic until you remember that Solana traded near $260 in late 2021, with far less adoption than today, and with practically zero in terms of its DeFi application revenue. Assuming network revenue keeps compounding while fee-burn mechanics retire a slice of every transaction cost, the float of available tokens will tighten over time, pushing the price lever upward.

Speed and cost aren't the only draws. Solana's single-shard architecture lets every smart contract and program see the same state at once, cutting the complexity of cross-chain bridges that have plagued rivals with hacks and downtime. If big-ticket real world asset (RWA) platforms or AI inference markets pick a chain for throughput reasons, Solana's capacity to process 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) makes it a frontrunner.

Still, five years is plenty of time for potholes along the way. A hard regulatory crackdown on low-fee chains, a catastrophic validator outage, or Ethereum's long-awaited darksharding upgrade could all erode Solana's edge.

Macro shocks matter, too. If liquidity vanishes from the market, fee revenue will follow it down for both its apps and the network itself.

Even so, the core thesis is simple. Money talks.

When a chain out-earns everyone else for nine straight months, the market usually notices eventually. If Solana's revenue keeps sprinting while its tokenomics quietly throttle supply, a triple-digit price tag starting with "5" is no stretch whatsoever over the next few years.

In fact, I predict that it'll happen before 2030, because right now, its competitors simply can't keep up with its main draws.

Should you invest $1,000 in Solana right now?

Before you buy stock in Solana, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Solana wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $671,477!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,010,880!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 1,047% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of July 7, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Key Points

• Cardano is considering a new plan to add Bitcoin to its treasury.

• The idea is to stimulate its decentralized finance ecosystem.

• The chain's prospects for growth are still a bit dim at the moment.

Turning a modest stake into a life-changing fortune is every crypto investor's favorite daydream, and it's a daydream for a reason. Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA) has long been marketed as a research-driven "third-generation" blockchain that might one day join the industry's elite. For anyone holding $10,000 worth of ADA today, the question is whether a decade is enough time for that bet to blossom into $1 million.

But hope is not a strategy. Cardano's current fundamentals, its slow pace of execution, and the scale of its competition all stand between today's price and a 100x return. Let's investigate the odds here, and determine what would need to change for those odds to improve.

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Cardano's 100x dream meets basic math

For a $10,000 position to become $1 million, Cardano's price must rise 100-fold, from roughly $0.60 to about $60.

That implies a market cap of roughly $2.1 trillion, which would put it neck-and-neck with the value of Bitcoin, whose own market cap is near $2.2 trillion today. Simply put, Cardano would need to leapfrog every other Layer-1 chain and match the entire value of the market's monarch. That is a breathtaking hurdle for a network that currently ranks outside the top 10 by total chain fees and decentralized finance (DeFi) activity.

But just how far behind is it?

Cardano's total value locked (TVL) in DeFi sits around $251 million, or barely 3% of archrival Solana, which boasts nearly $8.6 billion in TVL. Cardano also hosts only about $31 million in on-chain stablecoins, a vital lubricant for lending platforms and payment apps on any chain. With such thin liquidity, ambitious builders gravitate elsewhere, starving Cardano of the network effects that power exponential growth.

To make matters thornier, the project's "peer-review first, iterate later" ethos, while appealing in an academic sense, means upgrades arrive slowly.

While that rigor appeals to computer science purists, it leaves Cardano reacting very late to trends like real world asset tokenization, artificial-intelligence agents, and decentralized physical infrastructure networks, rather than defining them.

Investors looking for a fast follower, much less a first mover, will not find one here.

Could new tactics change Cardano's trajectory?

Enter the recent headline-grabbing plan to convert 5% to 10% of Cardano's $1.2 billion treasury, or roughly $100 million worth of ADA, into Bitcoin and Cardano-native stablecoins.

Proponents argue the swap could generate yield, fund Cardano buybacks, and improve liquidity for its DeFi protocols. Critics counter that parking treasury assets in someone else's token is an admission that Cardano lacks the native demand to put its own coin to productive work -- and that argument is largely correct given the chain's current context of minimal DeFi activity.

Even if the move ends up being implemented and stabilizes prices at the margin, it does nothing to address Cardano's scarcity of high-traffic applications.

The chain still needs a thriving stablecoin ecosystem, consumer-friendly wallets, and deep integration with the regulated financial sector if it hopes to claim a slice of the trillion-dollar real-world-asset tokenization pie, nevermind other areas where institutional investors might be interested in allocating capital to its chain. Right now, its share of that segment is effectively zero, while bigger rivals are sprinting ahead.

Assuming Cardano could quadruple its DeFi TVL annually -- which would be a heroic pace that it almost certainly cannot do even for one year -- it would still trail today's leaders in 2030. It would not justify a multitrillion-dollar valuation. So it would not be able to grow by 100x.

The more realistic route would be a tightly focused pivot, wherein it specialized in one breakout niche and became indispensable there. Barring such a strategic victory, which is currently nowhere even close to being envisioned, the probability of a 100x price move by 2035 remains vanishingly small.

Therefore, investors hoping for millionaire status from a $10,000 Cardano stake are betting on an improbable combination of perfect execution, surging adoption, and very favorable macro conditions. Keep dreaming, because becoming a millionaire from investing in this coin will not happen.

Should you invest $1,000 in Cardano right now?

Before you buy stock in Cardano, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Cardano wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $699,558!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $976,677!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 1,060% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 30, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Key Points

• Dogecoin has a big sail to catch sentiment-driven hype.

• XRP has real utility and features that attract capital to its chain.

• Delivering millionaire-maker returns is a very high bar for most assets to clear.

Sprinting races and marathons both cover distance, but using the strategy that works in one will wreck you in the other. Crypto investors chasing "millionaire-maker" coins often confuse the two, buying a meme coin sprinting across social media.

Two perennial favorites in this conversation are Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) and XRP (CRYPTO: XRP).

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Both have cult followings and large market caps, yet only one is building the muscle needed for a long haul. Let's see which, if either, has the special sauce to make investors into millionaires, and then separately answer the question of whether either deserves a slot in a sensible portfolio.

Dogecoin's upside is only limited by investor enthusiasm

Dogecoin commands a respectable $25.7 billion market cap at a price near $0.17 and 150 billion coins in circulation.

Those numbers matter, because every year, another 5 billion DOGE trickles into the supply through block rewards. The protocol has no cap on supply, so supply growth is perpetual, even if the inflation rate shrinks over time.

With fundamentals this thin, price action has long hinged on celebrity shout-outs and macro phenomena that dictate liquidity conditions in the crypto sector. Elon Musk's social media posts have, in the past, served as prime catalysts for sudden spikes and slides in the coin's value. That isn't something serious investors look for when they're evaluating an asset's merits, because it's actually a risk.

Separately, the coin has no formal road map, and no major functionality upgrades are in progress. It's a meme coin, not a living project that could offer real utility someday.

So what does it take to parlay a $10,000 stake in this coin into $1 million? Per the math, a neat 100-fold move would do the trick. That would lift its market cap to roughly $2.5 trillion, which is to say, greater than Bitcoin's entire float.

That leap also implies mass adoption, a killer utility use, or a meme craze bigger than any in internet history, enabled by multiple firehoses of supporting liquidity from central bankers around the world.

None of those things look at all likely.

This coin won't make anyone into a millionaire again.

XRP has real utility, but it's still a long shot here

XRP's market cap sits north of $133 billion, at about $2.26 per coin. Demand for the coin stems from more than silly pictures of dogs.

First, the development cadence of its chain is brisk.

On June 30, Ripple, the company that develops XRP, pushed its long-awaited Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) sidechain to the mainnet, letting smart contracts written in the same language as what's used for Ethereum run on the XRP ledger (XRPL) for a fraction of typical gas costs. That opens the door to onboarding thousands of existing decentralized applications (dApps) and app developers to XRP, and it is very probable it'll be stealing them from the Ethereum ecosystem, perhaps permanently.

Second, Ripple is spending to widen XRPL's moat.

The April acquisition of prime broker Hidden Road for more than $1.2 billion gives institutional investors an on-ramp for lending, cross-margining their capital, and transaction settlement that operates directly on the ledger. And Ripple's road map includes building more compliance tooling aimed squarely at enticing banks and asset managers to store their capital on its chain.

These moves won't send the coin to the moon overnight, but they do give XRP multiple levers in the form of transaction fees, stablecoin issuance, and custody tooling to capture a large amount of value as the finance sector moves to using blockchains as its plumbing. If XRP nabs even a sliver of the trillions in real-world assets (RWAs) forecast to migrate to on-chain management this decade, the upside will be enormous for investors who build up a position now.

But could XRP 100x, given its rosy setup today?

A jump to roughly $220 per coin would take its cap to about $13 trillion. That's still massive, and therefore very improbable in the near term.

But, unlike Dogecoin, XRP has plausible growth drivers in the form of enterprise adoption and a living road map. Don't confuse its better odds of making investors richer with good odds for it making anyone into a millionaire.

For investors, that translates to moderation. Buy and hold XRP if you're interested in getting some exposure to its considerable upside, but keep your expectations in check, and don't over-invest, especially not if your portfolio isn't sufficiently diversified first.

Should you invest $1,000 in Dogecoin right now?

Before you buy stock in Dogecoin, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Dogecoin wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $699,558!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $976,677!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 1,060% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 30, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Investors in XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) are in a good position today. The coin has broken above $2 and sports a market cap north of $127 billion, making it the world's fourth-largest cryptocurrency. It's seeing widespread adoption by institutional investors, and there are a plethora of other reasons to be bullish about XRP's future.

Yet three headwinds are blowing straight in its face, and they explain why the gains have cooled since March. None of them are fatal, but ignoring them is like pretending a stiff breeze won't slow a kayak. So let's look at each challenge and see what it might mean for long-term holders.

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1. Competitors want to eat its lunch

The first challenge is the chain's competition from other cryptocurrencies and fintechs.

Ethereum now anchors roughly $126 billion of the $240 billion stablecoin market, cementing its role as the default solution for dollar-denominated transfers in the crypto sector despite its frequent clunkiness and mediocre user experience on average. Every stablecoin dollar routed through Ethereum is one less unit that might have been transferred via the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

Meanwhile, traditional payment processors are rolling out the same kinds of cross-border tools that once made XRP look revolutionary.

Visa just backed a fintech moving $12 billion a year in stablecoin settlements for businesses. Stripe, another payment processing company, is striking bank partnerships to do the same.

These companies own distribution channels, meaning that merchants already clear trillions of dollars through their pipes every year. If they add stablecoin rails, corporate treasurers have fewer reasons to bother with a crypto they have never held.

In theory, XRPL's speed and tiny fees still shine. In practice, network effects reward the chain where counterparties already keep accounts.

Unless Ripple, the business that issues XRP, can persuade the next wave of stablecoin issuers to launch natively on XRPL or deliver a blockbuster central-bank deal, the payments pie could keep enlarging without XRP securing a bigger slice.

2. Supply unlocks are problematic for some investors

For a value-oriented cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, the scarcity of coins is a major driver of higher prices, as new coins can only be produced at a very slow rate. So there's no untapped major reservoir of supply that buyers can reliably count on.

With XRP, supply trickles in like clockwork. Ripple's programmatic schedule releases 1 billion XRP from escrow on the first of every month. Roughly 80% of that sum is relocked and thus retained, but 100 million to 200 million coins still hit the float (get sold) in each cycle. At $2.15 per coin, that is $215 million of potential sell pressure every 30 days.

Annualized, the unlocked supply could reach 1.2 billion coins, equal to about 2% of XRP's circulating base of 58.9 billion. That dilution is mild compared with new token issuance elsewhere, yet it matters in a market where marginal buyers care about float, not total cap.

Every fresh tranche forces investors to absorb inventory before the price can advance. And aside from preventing prices from surging upward due to a supply shock, the mere existence of the tokens leaving escrow is enough to spook some investors and discourage them from buying anything at all.

3. Retail investor skepticism of crypto remains stubbornly high

Finally, market sentiment about the crypto sector as a whole is stuck in a rut that's likely dragging on XRP to some degree.

A Pew Research Center study from 2024 found 63% of U.S. adults have little to no confidence that today's crypto platforms are safe or reliable. Given XRP's commitment to offering compliance tools to help institutional investors and banks obey regulations, those fears are overblown, but people still have them. Another Pew survey, from 2022, found that 46% of people who actually bought crypto say performance has fallen short of expectations.

Skepticism translates into smaller purchases and slower conversion of the curious into the committed. That matters because retail investors still drive a big slice of crypto's price elasticity. Crypto fatigue is psychological, and bear market scars heal on their own timetable.

Assuming continued macro calm, a few years of visible real-world usage could flip the narrative. Until then, doubt will act like gravity on XRP's rallies -- but be aware that doesn't mean it can't grow significantly anyway.

Should you invest $1,000 in XRP right now?

Before you buy stock in XRP, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and XRP wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $659,171!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $891,722!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 995% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Ethereum, Visa, and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Success in crypto rarely comes from chasing hype. The investors who tend to come out ahead are those who focus on enduring utility or value, which are often revealed when a blockchain starts solving real-world problems in regulated markets. Right now, XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) fits that description.

From newly unlocked markets in the Middle East to a surging wave of interest in the chain's merits as a home for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, XRP's fundamentals are also aligning with a friendlier regulatory regime in the U.S. Each of these catalysts are potent on their own, and taken together, they form an explosive trio that could make the coin a lot more valuable than before. That's why it warrants an investment, even if it's a small one on the order of $1,000.

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Here's what you should know about each of these developments.

1. Dubai's green light opens new paths for capital to flow

In late May, the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) formally approved XRP under its virtual assets regime, making it the first coin that's allowed for use inside the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC).

Licensed banks, fintech companies, and treasury desks that operate in the DIFC can now build payment, custody, and liquidity products on top of XRP without seeking separate exemptions from regulators.

That matters because the DIFC is the Middle East's biggest dollar-clearing zone. It's also a hub for multinational corporations routing billions in working capital flows every day. So if XRP can be used as the medium of exchange for even a portion of those money transfers, the coin is well-positioned to accomplish that goal.

With the requisite regulatory compliance boxes ticked already, an importer in Dubai can settle invoices in seconds instead of days, while a global bank or institutional investor can hold XRP as an on-ledger liquidity vehicle. The alternatives to XRP in these contexts are significantly more expensive and substantially slower on average.

Assuming that even a small slice of the region's $400 billion in annual trade volume migrates to on-ledger settlement, incremental demand for XRP could run well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. While such an outcome is not guaranteed, the path is now legally open, which is something rival networks cannot claim -- and that's yet another bullish wrinkle to add to this bullish catalyst.

2. A $7 billion tokenized treasury boom is looking for a home

Businesses that transact on the blockchain want to hold assets on the blockchain too, because it's convenient. For that to happen, the assets need to be tokenized, which is to say that the rights to their ownership need to be traceable via a newly created crypto token.

When it comes to assets that companies need to hold the most, U.S. Treasury bills and bonds are up there. On the XRP Ledger (XRPL), tokenizing U.S. Treasuries has gone from idea to reality in under two years.

The total value of on-chain Treasuries hit $7.2 billion this week across all blockchains, up nearly 50% this year. XRP is going to be the home of an increasing proportion of that pie.

Ondo Finance just bridged its $693 million OUSG token, a short-duration Treasury fund, to the XRPL. When paired with the ledger's feature set, institutional capital will likely be enticed more than before as a result. XRP's built-in compliance features will allow asset managers to satisfy know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) rules, which are prerequisites for their deployment of capital.

Therefore, institutions that must demonstrate airtight controls can experiment with tokenized Treasuries and other fixed income instruments (bonds) using infrastructure that looks and feels like the systems they already trust. In the long run, that'll increase the value of XRP, as it'll lead to more capital being parked on its chain.

3. The SEC is softening

Regulatory risk has long been XRP's Achilles' heel, but the tide has finally undeniably turned in its favor, and the positive effect is just starting to hit.

In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) moved to dismiss its high-profile lawsuit against Ripple, the business that issues XRP, ending a years-long legal battle that had scared off institutional investors from approaching the coin and the chain.

A friendlier enforcement climate lowers the odds of fresh actions against Ripple and increases the likelihood that pending applications for spot XRP exchange-traded funds (ETFs) will clear the SEC's gauntlet.

To be clear, regulators could reverse course, and court battles tied to other chains still loom, so litigation could still rain on the parade a bit. Yet the balance of probabilities now favors XRP, and that is a material change from the fog that hung over it just a year ago.

Should you invest $1,000 in XRP right now?

Before you buy stock in XRP, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and XRP wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $658,297!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $883,386!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 992% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025

Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

When people daydream about cryptocurrency investments, the fantasy usually ends with imagining how they will spend all of the millions of dollars they made. Yet very few assets have the horsepower to turn a modest investment into that kind of money.

And with the market marching toward fresh highs again, two of the sector's leaders, Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) and XRP (CRYPTO: XRP), keep resurfacing in those millionaire-maker conversations. One is celebrated as digital gold; the other is quietly wiring real cash around the globe. Which of the pair is more likely to bring riches to investors?

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Bitcoin shows the power of enforced scarcity

Let's start by examining first principles.

Bitcoin's protocol caps its supply at 21 million coins. So it can't experience debasement in the way that a fiat currency does. As many coins have been burned, lost, or otherwise rendered inaccessible, there will always be far fewer coins than that available for sale, which makes the supply proposition even sweeter.

Demand is the other half of the equation, and in Bitcoin's case, it looks very favorable as well.

In May alone, crypto funds pulled in roughly $7.1 billion of net inflows, most of which went into Bitcoin-backed exchange-traded funds (ETFs), thereby pushing their total assets under management to a record $167 billion. Other data indicate that a total of $11 billion has poured into digital-asset products during the past seven weeks. This is undeniable evidence that Bitcoin is in demand from asset managers.

Scarcity plus new buyers is a potent combination for price. A very large proportion of Bitcoin is now being held at a profit based on recent prices. Fewer nervous hands holding coins that are underwater translates into fewer sudden supply shocks.

Should ETFs see outflows or regulators reverse course, the float (coins available for public trading) would loosen and price momentum could stall quickly. Even then, the coin's halvings every four years or so will keep expansion of new supply shrinking, mathematically raising the odds that any dip is temporary rather than terminal.

Now it's time to rain on the parade. With an investment of $10,000 today, Bitcoin would need to reach a market cap of around $210 trillion for it make you into a millionaire. For reference, that's roughly twice the size of the gross domestic product of the entire global economy in 2024.

In other words, don't hold your breath for a small investment in this coin to make you into a millionaire.

XRP's utility is a mixed blessing in this context

Where Bitcoin leans on scarcity, XRP is built to move money as cheaply as an email, which is to say practically free. Ripple, the company that issues the XRP coin, is building it out to be the core of an entire ecosystem of financial products and services that are oriented toward the needs of the largest institutional investors out there.

A recent corporate guide from Ripple pitches global e-commerce, which is now past a total value of $6 trillion in annual sales, as low-hanging fruit to market XRP to deliver faster settlement. Running even a small portion of those payments would require institutions to buy quite a bit of XRP, sending the coin's price aloft.

Technical momentum is picking up too. In March, the XRP ledger's latest upgrade activated native automated market makers, letting anyone contribute liquidity and earn fees without clunky smart contract workarounds.

That feature could deepen on-chain liquidity and make XRP spreads more competitive with fiat rails, which would in turn make institutional investors more interested in parking their capital on the chain, as it could support the transaction sizes they need. In April, Ripple folded its new RLUSD stablecoin into Ripple Payments, which now claims nearly $10 billion in trading volume since its December launch. The stablecoin is hosted on XRP's network, so its value contributes to the total value of the chain and the coin.

Still, a few headwinds remain.

XRP's economics depend heavily on Ripple's business decisions and its work to develop its features. A strategic misstep or a fresh legal tangle with the Securities and Exchange Commission could sap adoption severely and depress the coin's price. Other chains are competing with it to court the same institutional money, and in some segments, they're winning.

Thus the coin's utility alone does not guarantee price appreciation.

Which coin carries better millionaire odds?

Neither XRP nor Bitcoin are going to make you a millionaire overnight. But both could be great wealth-building tools if you're willing to diligently dollar-cost average into a position and hold it for a handful of years.

With that said, if your goal is simply to stack a nest egg that could cross seven figures within a decade or two, Bitcoin's path is clearer. It needs only continued scarcity-driven demand to succeed, which is something that the ETFs, a growing number of corporate treasuries holding it, and perhaps even governments will provide.

In contrast, XRP requires both steady protocol evolution and a broad corporate shift toward on-ledger settlement of transactions in a few different categories to see its price reach meteoric heights. That can happen, but it involves more moving parts and a longer adoption curve, so it isn't as reliable a millionaire-maker.

Should you invest $1,000 in XRP right now?

Before you buy stock in XRP, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and XRP wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $658,297!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $883,386!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 992% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The market loves a good comeback story, and right now Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) is auditioning for the lead role. After spending most of 2023 and 2024 lagging other major cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has surged roughly 30% during the past 90 days. There's reason to believe that this move is not just another speculative pop.

There are four catalysts that look built to last. If those forces keep pulling in the same direction, the rally may be only the opening act.

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Let's check them out and understand how they fit into the coin's longer-term picture.

1. Cooling inflation turns the macro tide

Ethereum, like all cryptocurrencies, is very sensitive to macroeconomic phenomena like inflation and the money supply.

On that front, things are looking pretty good right now.

May's Consumer Price Index (CPI) showed inflation running at 2.4%, the lowest readout since early 2023. That reading boosts the odds that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates later this year, which will make it cheaper for banks to borrow money, and thus more likely that investors will need to look further down the risk curve, toward crypto, to get a return beyond the cost of borrowing.

In short, lower rates have historically tended to nudge investors out of cash and into longer‑duration bets like crypto.

Markets are already leaning that way. The U.S. dollar index, which tracks the strength of the dollar relative to other currencies, just slipped to a three‑year low on expectations of easier money.

Cheaper dollars make dollar‑denominated assets with fixed supplies look more attractive, and Ethereum fits that bill.

2. Institutional money is piling in

When the biggest wallets start buying, price moves can snowball. And there aren't any players with bigger wallets than institutional investors like pension funds and hedge funds.

During the week of May 13, $205 million flowed into Ethereum‑linked products, making for the strongest haul since early 2024, and about 25% of all crypto exchange-traded product (ETP) inflows. The momentum kept rolling; by mid‑June, Ethereum exchange‑traded funds (ETFs) had logged a 16‑day intake streak worth almost $900 million.

Pension funds and ETF sponsors are not day traders. Their allocations typically stay parked for multiple quarters or even years, effectively removing supply from the market and signaling that the fear that dominated late 2024 is fading. And that's bullish for Ethereum, because they hold it now.

3. Pectra aims to make Ethereum cheaper and easier to use

Slated for activation in late 2025, Pectra is Ethereum's biggest technology overhaul in recent years.

The package rolls 11 improvement proposals into one release that simplifies wallets and smooths out gas (user) fee volatility via a variety of mechanisms.

Pectra tackles three persistent pain points in one go: user‑friendliness, account security, and unpredictable transaction costs. If its second phase has the intended affects when it launches later this year as planned, it could also help the network to scale, keeping costs lower and improving transaction times.

History suggests that every time Ethereum reduces friction, developer activity and on‑chain demand rise soon after, both of which tend to lift prices.

4. Staking deposits are locking up ever more coins

While Pectra cooks, Ethereum staking is already squeezing supply.

On June 11, staked Ethereum coins hit a record 34.6 million, accounting for roughly 29% of circulating supply, and up from 26% a year ago. Importantly, the staking share of total supply keeps rising even as the coin's price climbs, suggesting holders prefer yield to speculation. That means investors see that they can get a more attractive return by leaving their capital parked in staked coins rather than transferring it elsewhere, which in turn ensures that more value is stored on the chain, boosting the coin's price.

The reason for this is that staked coins cannot be sold without first exiting a validator queue, which can take days. Layering on Pectra's validator simplifications, which are expected to make staking cheaper and easier, it is plausible that 35% or even 40% of all Ethereum coins could be bonded for yield within a year.

A shrinking float (coin available for public trading) paired with growing demand is a classic recipe for sustained price strength, as it forces buyers to compete with each other in the form of bidding higher prices to secure coins of their own.

Still, investors should take note that none of these four forces I've mentioned guarantees a straight‑line ascent.

A macro shock or an unexpected bug in Pectra could smash confidence fast. Yet if inflation keeps easing, institutions keep allocating, the upgrade continues to land smoothly, and staking continues to grow, Ethereum's risk‑reward profile looks far stronger than it did six months ago.

Should you invest $1,000 in Ethereum right now?

Before you buy stock in Ethereum, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Ethereum wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $658,297!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $883,386!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 992% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

For decades, international payments have been routed through the SWIFT network, which is a messaging system that connects thousands of banks. SWIFT transactions can take days, sometimes weeks, because of intermediary banks, currency conversions, and messaging delays. The main users, banks, need to carry liquidity buffers to cover the risk of those issues. This means that using SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, comes with a capital burden for banks.

XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) is a cryptocurrency designed for nothing flashier than moving value from A to B almost instantly and for almost nothing in fees. Banks wrestling with faster-payments mandates and cross-border fee pressure now have a tool that settles transactions in the time it takes to blink, so long as they're willing to abandon SWIFT. Here's why some of those banks and other financial companies are starting to consider XRP as a core reserve they might keep for decades rather than merely as a cryptocurrency investment to hold on the balance sheet.

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It's a lot faster and cheaper than the status quo

On the XRP ledger (known as XRPL), a transfer finalizes in roughly three to five seconds, with typical network fees of less than 0.001 XRP, or about a tenth of a cent at recent prices. For the sake of comparison, consider that SWIFT's own progress report touts a "dramatic" improvement to a 24-hour average for cross-border settlement last year, down from 96 hours in 2019.

Why does that transaction time and cost gap matter to banks when it comes to choosing a technology to use?

If you're a bank, capital that's trapped in transit is capital that isn't earning a yield. Every hour shaved off transaction settlement frees up capital that can be redeployed, thereby enabling the bank to generate more earnings than it would otherwise. Thus, there's a strong financial incentive here for banks to switch, and little that keeps them tied to the legacy solution except for inertia.

Furthermore, XRP's fee structure is predictable. SWIFT's message charges, foreign exchange spreads, and flat fees can be on the order of $50 per transfer. Typically, those exchange fees are billed as a percentage of the transfer amount, with 1% being a common take, so costs add up quickly for players that need to transact frequently and in large sums. With XRP, costs stay microscopic regardless of notional transaction size, and there is no currency being exchanged, so there are no exchange fees at all.

That reliability underpins the token's appeal as a utility reserve rather than a speculative investment. Once adopted, if it's anything like SWIFT, banks will be loath to transition to something else unless the benefits of doing so are very compelling.

Compliance matters too

The speed of a solution alone has probably never sold a big bank's chief compliance officer on adopting a new technology. What moves the needle is control and traceability.

XRP's ledger natively bakes a slew of regulatory compliance features directly into the protocol. Asset issuers, including those with key assets like stablecoins, can freeze individual trust lines, enact a global freeze, or enable deposit authorization so an account only accepts funds it has vetted. These features let banks satisfy know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) obligations without incorporating external smart contract code, which is a tremendous headache on many other chains, particularly Ethereum.

As a result of XRP's compliance features and potential to cut costs, real-world pilots of financial businesses and organizations trialing XRP are piling up. Bhutan's central bank began a central bank digital currency (CBDC) sandbox on XRP's tech three years ago, looking to extend financial inclusion across its mountainous villages. More recently, Dubai green-lit a property tokenization platform that records deeds on XRPL, targeting $16 billion in real estate. Each project requires the ledger to prove it can handle regulated assets at scale, which is progress that risk officers and bank executives watch far more closely than investors typically do.

If those trials mature into production systems, banks holding XRP as an operational reserve gain a second benefit of optionality. The same tokens that are useful for making large international payments can also pay ledger fees for tokenized bonds or be used for trading other tokenized financial instruments. That versatility hedges against the risk that today's fast payment rails become tomorrow's legacy drag in the way that SWIFT is.

Thus, the durability of XRP as an asset is starting to look more persuasive than ever.

XRP's price can be volatile, yet the direction of travel toward faster payments, programmable compliance, and institutional custody is hard to miss.

For investors, that means the thesis behind buying and holding XRP today hinges less on a meme-driven price spike and more on the quiet decisions banks make to incorporate it over the next decade. Ripple, the company that issues XRP, is highly motivated to ensure that banks keep adopting the coin for their back-end use.

If XRP becomes the solution for tokenized deposits, CBDCs, and cross-border wholesale flows, demand from institutions with no intention of selling could easily anchor the coin's long-term value. And so far, the evidence is that things are moving in that direction.

Should you invest $1,000 in XRP right now?

Before you buy stock in XRP, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and XRP wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $669,517!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $868,615!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 792% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 173% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 2, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Few investments age gracefully when the world around them speeds up. The same pressure applies in crypto. Builders, investors, and users do not wait politely for laggards to catch up; they migrate to speed, liquidity, and, most of all, excitement.

That reality now confronts Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA), which was once celebrated for its emphasis on peer-reviewed research to advance its underlying technology, as well as for its deliberate pace of technical progress. Three red flags, in particular, suggest that the project risks permanent middle-of-the-pack status unless something changes quickly. Let's check out each of these warning signs in detail.

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1. Rivals are racing ahead in every dimension

In the crypto world, developers are the lifeblood of a blockchain.

They build decentralized apps (dApps), protocols, and tools that generate utility, liquidity, and real-world adoption. A thriving developer ecosystem attracts users, capital, and other partners, creating a virtuous cycle that drives a chain's value and growth. Without them, even the most technically sound chain can remain a ghost town.

In terms of developer activity in Cardano's ecosystem, it doesn't hold up very well against its chief competitors, Ethereum and Solana. Per Cryptometheus, a cryptocurrency data provider, Solana had 499 active developers, and Cardano had just 175 developers pushing updates for the week, down 33% from three months ago.

Furthermore, developers flow toward concentrations of capital, and that capital is pooling elsewhere. Fidelity, a major asset manager, filed in March to list a Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF). Bloomberg now pegs the approval odds of that ETF at 90% for 2025, which would be an institutional seal of approval that no Cardano product enjoys.

Meanwhile, Solana's total value locked (TVL) on its chain was nearly $12 billion in January and currently rests at around $8.6 billion. Cardano's TVL is just $331.6 million, down from $680.8 million in early December 2024. That means there's less real money parked on its chain.

And when builders, money, and regulators all prefer the other options, it's a big problem.

2. New upgrades aren't getting used

Blockchains tend to have technical constraints. Sometimes, those constraints are troublesome enough for users that the main engineers of the chain create big new modules or other solutions in an attempt to prevent the flight of disaffected investors, users, or ecosystem developers. The success or failure of those solutions is, thus, often a major factor in determining whether to invest in the chain's native token.

And in Cardano's case, the record with successfully developing workarounds to the chain's issues isn't great, at least not in recent times.

Cardano's Layer-2 (L2) system, Hydra, dazzled testers with a 1 million transactions-per-second (TPS) demo last December, implicitly promising to solve the issue of lethargic transaction times during periods of peak load. L2s like Hydra are designed to handle transactions off the main blockchain, reducing congestion and perhaps also fees while maintaining security and interoperability. But they only matter if users adopt them and volume grows. Otherwise, they're tech demos, not adoption drivers.

Five months after launch, no major exchange, payment processor, or other project has committed to using Hydra beyond a pilot.

Another solution, called Midnight, is a side chain, which means it's a parallel network intended for specialized features such as privacy, among others. Side chains can extend a blockchain's functionality by providing specialized services that don't burden the main chain. Midnight aims to attract institutional users who want confidential holding of assets on the chain, but so far, no major financial players have signed on, and no real user base exists.

These technical marvels might eventually matter. But until developers, institutions, or users adopt them, they remain tantalizing but empty promises. And that's a big warning sign that Cardano is failing to match its development of capabilities to the features that are actually in demand.

3. Cardano's mindshare is eroding, not expanding

Crypto is a popularity contest masquerading as a set of technologies.

On June 4, Cardano counted around 23,273 daily active addresses, whereas Solana cleared nearly 5 million in the same day. That gap widens whenever meme coin mania or non-fungible token (NFT) drops spark traffic spikes. Those are segments where Cardano barely registers, as its ecosystem is very sparse in both areas.

Social chatter mirrors the numbers. Per data from Santiment, a crypto data aggregator, Cardano ranks far below Ethereum and Solana in terms of social media post volume, hinting that investor excitement has simply remained elsewhere. If users, developers, and institutions are not talking about Cardano now, why would they flock to it later?

In other words, Cardano's investment thesis -- that academic rigor in the tech development process will eventually lead to late-bloomer dominance -- faces mounting counter-evidence. Unless Hydra suddenly wins real traffic or Midnight lands marquee clients, the token's upside may remain capped while the opportunity cost mounts. And there's just not much evidence to suggest that's happening, nor is there any reason to believe it will soon.

Should you invest $1,000 in Cardano right now?

Before you buy stock in Cardano, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Cardano wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $669,517!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $868,615!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 792% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 171% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 2, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) is about to experience an interesting tug of war over its supply. On one side are the predictable monthly coin supply releases from escrow by XRP's issuer, a company called Ripple. On the other side are the world's first XRP treasury companies, which are start-ups whose sole purpose is to stockpile the coin and sit on it to capture its price appreciation over time.

That second force is small today. But the very fact it now exists when it didn't before creates incremental, structural demand for a coin whose floating supply is otherwise set to expand. If you can handle a three-year holding window and an investment as small as $1,000, the odds are thus very favorable that demand will win out in your favor if you buy the coin. Let's explore why.

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Meet the new XRP treasurers

A crypto treasury company is a publicly traded business that raises capital, buys a digital asset like XRP, and thereby offers its shareholders levered exposure to the underlying asset's price. This approach was first used by Strategy with Bitcoin, and now the same model is being attempted by a few enterprising companies with XRP.

In late May, the solar power and storage business VivoPower pivoted to become the world's first XRP-focused treasury company, closing a $121 million private placement-funding round and then in early June specifically allocating $100 million to purchase XRP in an over-the-counter (OTC) deal. And it isn't alone in picking XRP as its treasury asset, at least not any more. Within 24 hours of VivoPower's announcement, two other small companies, Ault Capital Group and an Asia-based logistics holding business, disclosed plans to buy XRP as a strategic reserve asset.

Why bother with holding coins when there are other ways to make money that don't rely on the vagaries of the market to generate a return?

Although it's yet to be proven successful, except in the case of Strategy, generally crypto treasury companies argue they can outperform just holding their underlying assets directly by issuing equity or convertible debt, buying coins, and capturing any upside on behalf of shareholders. Those shareholders are effectively making a leveraged bet on the crypto by buying the company's stock, so it's true that their returns could be higher than just holding the coins directly.

Here's the math to know

How much impact will these new treasury companies have on XRP's supply relative to what's being released from escrow each month? If the answer is "close to zero," then the coin's critics can retain one of their arguments against buying it. On the other hand, if the treasurers are taking a large amount of supply off the table, it would be another argument in favor of buying and holding the coin.

Ripple still controls about 36.5 billion XRP in escrow and, by design, unlocks about 1 billion tokens on the first day of each month. Historically, roughly 800 million of that haul are relocked, leaving a net 200 million XRP that can hit the market and boost supply and depress prices. So there's an inflationary element of XRP that is relatively minor in the big scheme of things.

Compare that with VivoPower's initial $100 million purchasing goal for the asset. At today's XRP price of about $2.25, it can buy roughly 44 million XRP. In other words, a single new treasury entrant can sop up roughly 20% of a typical month's net supply increase. Layer in similar moves telegraphed by other aspiring crypto treasury companies, and supply can start to tighten rather quickly, at least for as long as there's a steady drumbeat of new entrants making big purchases.

Critics counter that treasury companies are leveraged, thinly capitalized, and prone to dumping if XRP's price plunges, which is a fair point. It's also the case that Ripple could decide to sell more of each month's escrow if prices surge.

Nonetheless, the key is that demand pressure from buyers now has a persistent, deep-pocketed corporate source instead of relying solely on retail traders and banks. And that's bullish.

The setup looks favorable here

Assuming the XRP treasury club grows, three tailwinds could reinforce the thesis for buying $1,000 of the coin and holding it for at least three years.

First, the approval of a U.S. exchange-traded fund (ETF) application is widely expected sometime in 2025. An approval would ignite institutional demand the way Bitcoin ETFs did. It's not guaranteed, but it's no secret that the new administration's leaders are very friendly toward crypto.

Second, the supply unlock schedule itself is finite and not very scary at all. If the unlocking pace persists as it has, Ripple's remaining stash of XRP will eventually run dry. The monthly supply drip could then end entirely, leaving crypto treasurers, remittance banks, and everyone else to fight over a fixed supply. That would drive prices up.

Finally, competition among treasurers is now accelerating. Corporate executives hunting for their own version of Strategy's moment of popularity may decide XRP's utility for making payments are safer than an all-Bitcoin bet.

Of course, none of this insulates investors from volatility. That's why a $1,000 starting stake is worthwhile; it keeps your exposure modest while still letting you participate in the upside if demand outruns new supply.

Patience is the key here. Give the tug-of-war three years to play out, and the coin's price will likely be a lot higher than it is right now.

Should you invest $1,000 in XRP right now?

Before you buy stock in XRP, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and XRP wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $669,517!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $868,615!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 792% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 171% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 2, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) founder and Chief Executive Officer Michael Saylor is one of the most vocal of the Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) bulls out there, and in recent days, he made yet another series of incredibly optimistic predictions about the coin's growth during the coming decades. Saylor says he expects the price of Bitcoin to rise at a 30% annual rate during the next 20 years, bringing its price into the ballpark of $13 million per coin.

For reference, its price is currently about $104,000, so Saylor's projection appears to be, at least on its face, extraordinarily ambitious, bordering on fantastical, or perhaps even what some would describe as delusional.

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Could he be right, or is this just another instance of another celebrity portfolio manager making lofty predictions in the course of "talking his book" to attract fresh capital for his most important investment?

The math is actually pretty favorable here

During the past 10 years, the price of Bitcoin rose by 43,820%. That puts its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) at 84%; during the past five years, its CAGR was 62%. Therefore, the back-of-the-napkin math for Saylor's predicted growth rate looks to be on the conservative side relative to the coin's historical performance.

Let's emphasize that point: Saylor's forecast for Bitcoin is based on a scenario in which it would consistently perform significantly worse than it has historically. But will this growth actually happen?

If it does, it certainly won't occur such that the coin's price marches upward each year in an orderly fashion. Multiple crashes of as much as 80% have already happened in Bitcoin's history, and similar plunges will probably happen again. Notably, the asset has recovered from all of those plunges so far and gone on to reach higher highs afterward. It's more probable than not that it will repeat those patterns.

In the current era, there are also a handful of drivers for Bitcoin's price that make it an attractive asset to hold even if it isn't capable of growing by as much as Saylor is banking on. Governments, institutional investors, and major corporations are all evaluating whether to hold it on their balance sheets, or are already acquiring it. Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are giving investors easier access to the asset. And that's before even getting into the long-term drivers of its price performance, like its halving schedule and the scarcity that's baked into the coin's protocol.

So all of those trends will contribute upward pressure on the price of the coin during the next 10 to 20 years, as well as providing boosts in the shorter term as the commanders of large volumes of capital implement their Bitcoin strategies.

Even Saylor is advising you not to bet the farm

All of this is to say that Saylor could well be right about Bitcoin's long-term trajectory. There isn't any obvious barrier that would prevent the asset from compounding at the pace his forecast calls for.

Nonetheless, he explicitly warns against quitting your day job in hopes that the coin's price appreciation will carry the day for your personal finances. Nor is it advisable to sell your house to buy Bitcoin, nor to go into debt for the sake of accumulating it at a faster pace. The implications of a bright future for Bitcoin are no excuse to sacrifice the fundamentals of personal finance or your portfolio's diversification.

However, if Saylor's bullishness catches your imagination (as perhaps it should) what might make sense is to bump up the size of the allocation to Bitcoin in your portfolio. For conservative investors who might need their funds within the next five years, an allocation of 1% is reasonable, but for those with longer time frames, 5% or more could be a good idea. Just remember, you will only get the benefit of its price compounding over time if you keep your coins rather than sell them.

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Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

There's one new paradigm in play that might make Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA) a better cryptocurrency to buy than Solana (CRYPTO: SOL). It doesn't have much to do with the technology underpinning either chain, but it is something that investors should probably know about today rather than when it might start making a price impact, which could take a few years.

Let's analyze what's going on and determine whether it makes Cardano worth considering, or whether it will continue lagging behind.

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The pace of ecosystem development matters

One of the most important factors supporting an investment thesis for buying a coin is whether there is a lot of activity on its chain. When projects on a chain are appealing to users because they offer an important decentralized finance (DeFi) service or other valuable capability, it attracts capital, boosting the price of the native token in the process. At the same time, if there's no compelling reason to park capital on a chain, money tends to flow elsewhere to find a return via investment, or to be used to pay for utility of some kind.

For investors, understanding the level of activity on a chain is not enough to make a sound decision. Instead, getting a sense of how much activity might increase in the future is key, as it's future usage that would drive prices up for those who invest today. There's no surefire way of determining whether a chain will be more in use in the future than it is today, but if there are a lot of interesting or valuable projects in development in the chain's ecosystem, it's a vote in favor of there being future demand.

Cardano is significantly smaller than Solana, with a market cap of $23.6 billion compared to the other coin's market cap of $74.3 billion. Therefore, with all else being equal, one would expect that the volume of ongoing software development for the projects hosted on each coin's ecosystem would be proportional to the chain's size, suggesting that Solana would have roughly 3 times as much development activity as Cardano.

It's difficult to measure how much software development activity is going on, but there are a few composite metrics that can approximately track how many times developers make substantive additions or changes to a chain's projects. One such composite metric, created by the crypto data provider Santiment, shows that Solana experienced around 464,000 ecosystem development events in the last 12 months, whereas Cardano experienced 389,900 events. So Cardano is seeing a huge amount of developer activity in its ecosystem for its size, and it isn't just a blip.

There's more than one factor that's relevant here

Experiencing more developer activity on its chain relative to Solana is not a slam dunk as far as making Cardano worth buying.

Cardano has a couple of substantial disadvantages that still make it a less appealing investment than Solana. First, it's more expensive and slower to transact on. Making a swap on Solana takes about a second and costs a fraction of a penny, whereas the same action on Cardano takes a few seconds at best and costs roughly $0.20 on average. That incentivizes more developers to develop applications on Solana over the long term.

Second, Cardano's ecosystem is nowhere near as diverse as Solana's, nor is it as vibrant today. It's nearly completely missing out on critical growth segments like artificial intelligence, as well as less-serious but still capital-attractive segments like meme coins. Other important categories, like stablecoins on the chain, are incredibly small for Cardano's size compared to the equivalent assets on Solana. So it has fewer opportunities for capital to flow in, and a weaker set of tools to accommodate users or investors interested in large transaction sizes.

Thus, while it's undeniably bullish for the chain to have a lot of development activity relative to a much larger chain, constituting a moderate-strength reason to consider making an investment, it's more than offset by the mediocre health of its ecosystem today. There isn't a strong reason to buy it over Solana.

It's possible that might change over the coming years, especially if its activity ramps up even more. But investors should be aware that such activity is only an investable factor if it's being directed toward producing real projects of value. And so far, Cardano simply isn't the home for the projects cryptocurrency investors are finding to be valuable today.

Should you invest $1,000 in Cardano right now?

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Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $591,533!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $652,319!*

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Alex Carchidi has positions in Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Cardano and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

With so many different forces affecting its value at all times, it's remarkable that Bitcoin's (CRYPTO: BTC) price isn't even more volatile. So when there's significant purchasing action by a large holder that claims to want to hold on to its hoard of the coin forever, like there has been over the last couple of weeks, it's worth paying attention to.

After all, high-profile buying could be interpreted as a tailwind for higher prices. Or it could be viewed as a risk, since it might precede later news of the same actor ditching its position for greener pastures.

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With those dynamics in mind, let's break down who's buying it right now and why it could be an important factor in the coin's performance over the coming years.

Is it worth following this whale's move?

Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), which was originally a software business known as MicroStrategy but now claims to be a Bitcoin treasury, just purchased $555.8 million of Bitcoin in the week of April 14 through April 20, bolstering its smaller purchase of $285.5 million during the week ending on April 14.

It now has about $36.5 billion of the asset, which it procured using funds from a combination of borrowing and stock issuance, for an average price of $67,766 per token. These sizable purchases come on the heels of an even larger one executed at the end of March, which was worth $1.9 billion.

Given that Strategy has been loath to sell its Bitcoin so far, and that it might not ever do so unless forced to, some investors could interpret its ongoing confidence in the coin as a reason to buy it. After all, it controls around 2.5% of all the crypto that's currently in circulation, which is actually a very large proportion for an asset that's highly distributed and decentralized in nature.

With that much supply taken off the market, it will increase the competition among buyers for the remaining portion that's still for sale, which will drive prices up over the medium and long terms. Especially when paired with Bitcoin's other scarcity-generating mechanics, like its increasing mining difficulty over time, this kind of supply control can make it far more expensive for future buyers to secure a position of their own, significantly rewarding those who got in earlier, like Strategy.

At the same time, investors may also be interested in buying more Bitcoin because of the publicity that Strategy's purchases tend to bring. There's something compelling in the narrative of having a major evangelist for an asset that's proudly buying it at practically any price.

What's more, having a powerful advocate for the strategy of simply buying and holding Bitcoin is something that holders can benefit from, since it encourages the investor behavior that drives the price up over time.

Be aware that this is a risk

There is a bit of a possible downside to Strategy's purchasing activity. The company uses issuance of debt and equity to fund its purchases, as mentioned previously. That means if the price of Bitcoin drops enough, it could be forced into liquidation of its assets to make its creditors whole.

In other words, it could be forced into selling large volumes of its crypto, thereby potentially creating a downward spiral in the coin's price.

That outcome might not happen. Still, if Strategy continue to procure more and more of Bitcoin's total supply, the risk will increase, so it's important to recognize. There is no reason to hold off on buying the coin, but it is worth keeping an eye on, because a forced-selling cascade could actually be a good buying opportunity if it ever happens, assuming you can stomach buying the dip.

Overall, for now, Strategy's repeated public commitments to never selling any Bitcoin and its repeated purchasing of even more are a minor to moderately strong bullish tailwind. But, as a matter of principle, a big investor loading up on an asset cannot be a part of the investment thesis for that asset or a significant reason for buying it; that's simply bad investing form to try to borrow someone else's conviction to make a decision for yourself, and it never works in the long run anyway.

So buy Bitcoin if you're willing to hold it, but don't feel any pressure to copy what Strategy does.

Should you invest $1,000 in Bitcoin right now?

Before you buy stock in Bitcoin, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Bitcoin wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $591,533!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $652,319!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 859% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 158% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

See the 10 stocks »

*Stock Advisor returns as of April 21, 2025

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.