In crypto, a handful of blockchains are in the process of trying to become the financial plumbing for the next era of the global economy. These fintech coins exist to move and manage value for banks, financial institutions, and major corporations. And being close to those capital flows has traditionally been a way to make a ton of money by taking tiny tolls along the way.
Assuming this trend holds, I predict that XRP (XRP 0.57%) will prove to be the best fintech coin investors can buy with $2,000 between now and 2027. Here's why.
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This chain's fintech stack is getting surprisingly complete
As you doubtlessly know by now, XRP is the native coin of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), a network designed to handle international payments with fast transaction settlement and minuscule fees.
Ripple, the coin's issuer and the company behind much of the chain's ecosystem, offers a bunch of different financial services that lets banks and fintechs send money in seconds instead of days by using XRP and stablecoins as bridge assets rather than using prefunded accounts. The idea is to work with banks and offer a solution that updates their financial infrastructure, which is a friendlier narrative for regulators and risk committees than some of XRP's peers, which sometimes claim to be trying to replace outdated sections of the financial system entirely.
CRYPTO: XRP
Key Data Points
Where XRP really starts to look like a highly competitive fintech solution is in its compliance tooling, which, as boring as it might sound, is actually one of the most critical features for the target users (banks). There's simply no way that a major financial institution is willingly going to use a piece of technology that's difficult to audit or that adds a significant regulatory compliance burden. The XRPL offers compliance features that allow issuers to restrict who can hold a coin and let them halt suspicious accounts if needed, among many other benefits.
On top of that, Ripple recently launched RLUSD, a U.S. dollar stablecoin. Ripple explicitly positions it for use in cross-border payments, as a treasury holding, and as tokenized real-world asset (RWA) trading collateral. It's an important part of the chain's capital base and its ecosystem, and with a market cap of $1.2 billion, it's actually large enough to be useful in the size that financial businesses need.
In other words, most of the components you would want in a fintech are available for those who are willing to hold XRP to pay transaction fees. And in the long run, that's likely to pay off for those who secure some of the supply now.
Why this coin will outperform its peers
The rest of the fintech coin category includes projects like Stellar, Algorand, and even stablecoin platforms like Tron. Each targets parts of the financial stack, but none, save for XRP, can offer the whole package.
Stellar's design is aimed at cross-border remittances. MoneyGram, for example, uses Stellar's network to power cash-to-crypto on- and off-ramps in multiple markets. But there's no institutional finance story here, which caps the upside by quite a bit.
Algorand, for its part, has been a testbed for central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilots and asset tokenization experiments. Banks and governments are attracted by its high throughput and low latency. Still, the compliance tooling on Algorand is not as tightly vertically integrated as what Ripple is building.
Tron, meanwhile, began as a platform for digital entertainment and content sharing. Over time it expanded into payments and decentralized applications, but its strongest brand identity still centers on consumer entertainment and high throughput for stablecoin transfers rather than regulated finance.
XRP's edge is that it is building horizontally across this landscape. Ripple is spending heavily to acquire companies that will help it to stitch payments, stablecoins, lending, and tokenized assets into one big institution-ready package. And then it's marketing that package directly to the customers it wants to attract.
And that's just one more reason to predict that by 2027, XRP will turn out to have been the best fintech coin to buy with $2,000. Expect some volatility along the way, and be ready to hold through this coin's next leg of growth.
