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 (XRP 0.82%), a utility fintech coin aimed at capturing institutional money flows, and Shiba Inu (SHIB +0.76%), 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.
CRYPTO: XRP
Key Data Points
XRP's fundamentals look strong here
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.
Could these factors drive up XRP 100-fold and mint millionaires overnight?
Probably not. That would require a $12.9 trillion market cap --from $126 billion today -- which is not happening anytime soon.
But a realistic scenario of steady regulatory wins, ETF inflows (assuming the ETFs get approved), and continued banking adoption could still deliver a respectable and consistent return over the next decade.
Shiba Inu could melt faces, but don't count on it making you millions
Shiba Inu's elevator pitch is simple. What if there were a coin that could repeat Dogecoin's magic, but with trillions more tokens, and a mascot dripping with internet culture? Well, that coin might just go to the moon -- or so buyers are perpetually hoping.
To mint a single new millionaire from a very large $10,000 stake, this coin must climb 100-fold, lifting its valuation to roughly $680 billion from about $6.8 billion today, which is to say it would need to be a bit bigger than some of the world's largest companies creating real value every day, like Visa, which has a market cap of $678 billion.
Image source: Getty Images.
Defenders point to Shiba Inu's aggressive token burning program.
In mid-June, there were 116 million tokens burned, which sounds like a lot. But 116 million is 0.00002% of the supply, which means it's mathematically irrelevant to the coin's float of 589.2 trillion tokens.
Meanwhile, every macro catalyst that might lift Shiba Inu will also lift higher-quality assets. Investors chasing meme coins for the liquidity wave argument ignore that the same flood of easy money can flow into XRP as well, which has dramatically stronger fundamentals and thus more staying power.
The bottom line here is that Shiba Inu is unlikely to make you a millionaire unless you already put down near-millionaire money or catch an unpredictable, sentiment-driven spike and exit before gravity returns -- and you almost certainly won't. For most long-term investors, that is neither a strategy nor a plan.
In closing, XRP may not deliver a fairy-tale 100-fold gain, but at least it has a road map to justify calculated optimism and long-term holding.
