Most traders know the lure of a lottery ticket. In crypto, that ticket usually takes the type of a meme coin promising in a single day riches — and, in very uncommon circumstances, shopping for the ticket does repay. But wealth is way extra generally constructed the unglamorous method, not in a single moonshot, and multiple investor has misplaced all of it betting on a speculative asset when a much less flashy one held for the long run would have made them a lot richer.
With international liquidity thawing and a recent crop of crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) inching towards approval, chatter about millionaire makers is again. Two fan favorites are fairly in style within the dialog: XRP (XRP 4.95%), a utility fintech coin geared toward capturing institutional cash flows, and Shiba Inu (SHIB 1.67%), a meme coin powered virtually completely by vibes.
Let’s dig in and decide which of the 2 is extra seemingly to make traders a lot wealthier.
XRP’s fundamentals look robust right here
Certainly one of XRP’s greatest property within the matchup towards Shiba Inu is that its issuer, Ripple, is actively creating the XRP Ledger (XRPL) to attraction to a particular group of institutional investors.
Ripple’s ledger is constructed for banks, foreign money alternate homes, and people in search of cost rails. In April, Ripple agreed to purchase prime dealer Hidden Street for $1.2 billion, bringing with it a shopper base that clears roughly $3 trillion in trades annually into XRP’s orbit. Now, Hidden Street’s quantity can be cleared within the again finish utilizing the coin, which helps its value by rising demand. Moreover, providing institutional plumbing issues as a result of it turns a token from a speculative chip into working capital.
Momentum is constructing on the market-access facet, too.
Money-settled XRP futures trading simply launched in Might, pulling in $19 million on day one. Analysts now assign roughly 90% odds of an XRP ETF getting the inexperienced mild inside months, which may solely occur if futures buying and selling had been continuing easily.
The present set of macro situations will even assist buoy XRP’s value. Central banks from Europe to Canada have just lately pivoted to chopping rates of interest, decreasing the price of borrowing cash, and the Federal Reserve within the U.S. is broadly anticipated to minimize charges earlier than the top of 2025, turning liquidity from headwind to tailwind for danger property like XRP.
Might these components drive up XRP 100-fold and mint millionaires in a single day?
Most likely not. That might require a $12.9 trillion market cap –from $126 billion at the moment — which isn’t occurring anytime quickly.
However a lifelike situation of regular regulatory wins, ETF inflows (assuming the ETFs get authorized), and continued banking adoption may nonetheless ship a respectable and constant return over the following decade.
Shiba Inu may soften faces, however do not rely on it making you hundreds of thousands
Shiba Inu’s elevator pitch is straightforward. What if there have been a coin that might repeat Dogecoin‘s magic, however with trillions extra tokens, and a mascot dripping with web tradition? Effectively, that coin may simply go to the moon — or so consumers are perpetually hoping.
To mint a single new millionaire from a very massive $10,000 stake, this coin should climb 100-fold, lifting its valuation to roughly $680 billion from about $6.8 billion at the moment, which is to say it might want to be a bit greater than among the world’s largest firms creating actual worth on daily basis, like Visa, which has a market cap of $678 billion.

Picture supply: Getty Photographs.
Defenders level to Shiba Inu’s aggressive token burning program.
In mid-June, there have been 116 million tokens burned, which appears like a lot. However 116 million is 0.00002% of the provision, which suggests it is mathematically irrelevant to the coin’s float of 589.2 trillion tokens.
In the meantime, each macro catalyst which may carry Shiba Inu will even carry higher-quality property. Buyers chasing meme cash for the liquidity wave argument ignore that the identical flood of straightforward cash can circulation into XRP as nicely, which has dramatically stronger fundamentals and thus extra endurance.
The underside line right here is that Shiba Inu is unlikely to make you a millionaire except you already put down near-millionaire cash or catch an unpredictable, sentiment-driven spike and exit earlier than gravity returns — and also you virtually definitely will not. For many long-term traders, that’s neither a technique nor a plan.
In closing, XRP might not ship a fairy-tale 100-fold acquire, however no less than it has a highway map to justify calculated optimism and long-term holding.