Many altcoins, defined as any cryptocurrency besides Bitcoin (BTC +7.30%), fizzled out over the past year as high Treasury yields, unclear monetary policies, and other messy macro headwinds drove investors toward more conservative investments.
However, investors who can stomach some near-term volatility might find a few good buying opportunities before the crypto market warms up again. Two of those promising altcoins are XRP (XRP +17.48%) and Solana (SOL +5.92%). Let's see why these two smaller tokens could still be worth nibbling on in this choppy market.
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XRP
XRP, the native token of the XRP Ledger, was created by the founders of Ripple Labs, a fintech company that specializes in blockchain-based money transfers. Its creators minted the entire supply of 100 billion tokens before launch, and it's primarily used as a "bridge currency" to accelerate transactions across Ripple's network.
CRYPTO: XRP
Key Data Points
In 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Ripple for selling its own XRP holdings to raise capital and argued that XRP was an unlicensed security. That lawsuit caused Ripple to lose several of its top customers, and the top crypto exchanges delisted XRP.
But last year, that lawsuit finally concluded with a lighter-than-expected fine for Ripple and a ruling that XRP wasn't a security when it was sold to retail investors. The crypto exchanges subsequently relisted XRP, and the SEC approved its first spot price ETFs in late 2025. Ripple also expanded by applying for a U.S. banking license and launching its own stablecoin. That expansion could support the increased usage of XRP as a bridge currency.
XRP can't be valued by its scarcity in the same way as Bitcoin, and its blockchain doesn't natively support the development of decentralized apps like Ethereum. However, it recently added Ethereum-compatible "sidechains" to drive more developers to integrate XRP into their applications. That expansion -- along with the growing usage of Ripple as a faster, cheaper, and more flexible alternative to traditional SWIFT transfers -- could drive XRP's price higher.
Solana
Solana was built on the same energy-efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism as Ethereum. However, it upgraded its blockchain with its own proof-of-history (PoH) mechanism, which timestamps transactions before they're validated. That tweak enables Solana to process Layer 1 (L1) transactions at much higher speeds than Ethereum and other PoS blockchains.
CRYPTO: SOL
Key Data Points
Solana suffered a significant setback when FTX collapsed in 2022. The crypto exchange held nearly $1.2 billion in Solana tokens and liquidated them to cover its debt. That liquidation, along with rising interest rates in 2022 and 2023, erased all of its massive gains from 2021.
Yet Solana continues to attract thousands of developers. To support that growth, it expanded its ecosystem with its digital payments platform, Solana Pay, added support for stablecoin transactions, and even launched its own blockchain-powered Android smartphone.
The SEC also approved Solana's first spot price ETFs in late 2025. Unlike Ethereum's first batch of spot price ETFs, which didn't include staking (to earn interest-like yields on locked-up tokens), most of Solana's new ETFs launched with staking. Those new ETFs could make Solana a more attractive investment for institutional investors.
Solana still faces some near-term challenges. Its L1 blockchain often struggles with network congestion, outages, and security issues. Its main developer languages (Rust and C) have steeper learning curves than Ethereum's Solidity, and other PoS blockchains are catching up to Solana with faster Layer 2 (L2) solutions that bundle transactions and process them off-chain. But if Solana overcomes those challenges, its price could stabilize and soar higher as it continues to pull more developers away from Ethereum and other PoS blockchains.
