Alex Carchidi, The Motley Fool

Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 3:30 AM5 min read

• It's tempting to pile all your money into investments that claim to offer huge returns.

• The ones that don't make those claims tend to be the better bets.

• XRP and Shiba Inu embody this clash very precisely.

• 10 stocks we like better than XRP ›

Most investors know the lure of a lottery ticket. In crypto, that ticket often takes the form of a meme coin promising overnight riches -- and, in very rare cases, buying the ticket does pay off. Yet wealth is far more commonly built the unglamorous way, not in a single moonshot, and more than one investor has lost it all betting on a speculative asset when a less flashy one held for the long term would have made them much richer.

With global liquidity thawing and a fresh crop of crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) inching toward approval, chatter about millionaire makers is back. Two fan favorites are quite popular in the conversation: XRP (CRYPTO: XRP), a utility fintech coin aimed at capturing institutional money flows, and Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB), a meme coin powered almost entirely by vibes.

Let's dig in and determine which of the two is more likely to make investors a lot wealthier.

One of XRP's biggest assets in the matchup against Shiba Inu is that its issuer, Ripple, is actively developing the XRP Ledger (XRPL) to appeal to a specific group of institutional investors.

Ripple's ledger is built for banks, currency exchange houses, and those seeking payment rails. In April, Ripple agreed to buy prime broker Hidden Road for $1.2 billion, bringing with it a client base that clears roughly $3 trillion in trades each year into XRP's orbit. Now, Hidden Road's volume will be cleared in the back end using the coin, which supports its price by increasing demand. Furthermore, offering institutional plumbing matters because it turns a token from a speculative chip into working capital.

Momentum is building on the market-access side, too.

Cash-settled XRP futures trading just launched in May, pulling in $19 million on day one. Analysts now assign roughly 90% odds of an XRP ETF getting the green light within months, which could only happen if futures trading were proceeding smoothly.

The current set of macro conditions will also help buoy XRP's price. Central banks from Europe to Canada have recently pivoted to cutting interest rates, reducing the cost of borrowing money, and the Federal Reserve in the U.S. is widely expected to cut rates before the end of 2025, turning liquidity from headwind to tailwind for risk assets like XRP.