Better Buy for This Crypto Bear Market: XRP or Dogecoin?

This crypto bear market hasn't been kind to XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) and Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE). XRP is down 69% from its July 2025 peak, and Dogecoin is down about 87% from its 2021 high and 45% in the last 12 months alone.

To make matters worse, neither coin was able to take the spotlight during the prior bull market cycle in terms of securing investor attention. That makes it a bit harder to believe that either will bounce back in the future.

So which one has the better odds of being a good purchase at this point in the crypto bear market?

Image source: Getty Images.

XRP is battered but still in the game

XRP is currently benefiting from tailwinds from spot XRP exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which have raised $1.4 billion since launching in November 2025. While it isn't fair to say that the purchasing activity of the ETF issuers is going to be enough to put a floor under the coin's price, because there's now an easy conduit for money in the traditional financial system to be allocated into XRP, it does have better odds of bouncing back from major drawdowns compared to in the past.

There's also capital moving directly onto the chain for management, which speaks to the value of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) as financial technology. On May 6, Ondo Finance, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, and Ripple, XRP's issuer, completed a cross-border tokenized U.S. Treasury redemption in under five seconds using the network. That's a proof of concept for the ledger as a place to manage tokenized assets, which would attract a lot of capital from financial institutions and potentially boost the price of XRP along the way.

But not every bid to grow the XRPL has succeeded.

The smart contract-capable sidechain, which launched in June 2025 and uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), has a total value of only $26,652 as of June 22 of this year. Bolting smart contracts onto the chain didn't generate sustained demand or attract capital inflows.

Dogecoin is (still) struggling to create a future

In contrast to XRP's experience, the ETFs meant to validate Dogecoin's value have been duds; the largest ETF recorded just $15.6 million in net inflows. There's little reason to expect that to change, as Dogecoin isn't used for anything, and there's no credible demand source on the horizon.

The next planned update to the chain, which is being built by groups of third-party developers rather than an internal developer team, is DogeOS, an application layer targeting a summer 2026 launch that would add smart contract capabilities to the network.

But the XRPL's failed experiment with launching a smart contract chain already showed that adding smart contracts to a network without preexisting demand does not, by itself, create the demand, nor is it necessarily positive for a project's value.

If developers weren't interested in building anything on the blockchain that's the closest to financial institutions and their capital among all other chains, it doesn't seem like they'd be interested in building anything on a financial backwater like Dogecoin. And even if they did start launching decentralized applications (dApps) on Dogecoin's new chain, assuming it is launched at all, there wouldn't necessarily be users or capital to make their efforts worthwhile.

So, even though XRP's price is down, there are at least some ongoing efforts by Ripple to develop it and market it to players who might need its capabilities and who have the money to pay for them. Dogecoin has no such support. That makes XRP worlds better than Dogecoin, regardless of what the market is doing.

JPMorgan Chase is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Ondo, and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.