Is XRP or Dogecoin More Likely to Be a Millionaire Maker?

XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) was built as payment scaffolding. Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) is the meme coin that keeps surprising people who bet against popular culture. These coins couldn't be more different.

Both have posted big multiyear gains and made some investors into millionaires, with Dogecoin being the clear five-year standout, up by an absurd 9,780% compared to XRP's gain of 1,090%. But if your goal is long-term wealth-building from here on out rather than an outrageously risky thrill ride, there's a clear winner between these two. There are no guarantees in the world of investing or crypto, but let's investigate which of these coins is more likely to still be a millionaire maker.

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XRP has decent odds for serious wealth-building

XRP's core goal is to serve financial institutions and payment businesses across a handful of different functions.

Its chain, the XRPL, originally a platform for doing quick and cheap money transfers, is now a place where users can park value in stablecoins, process payments, access liquidity for settling trades in the traditional or cryptocurrency markets, and generate a yield from real-world assets (RWAs) like U.S. Treasuries.

Ripple, the company that issues XRP, has a go-to-market strategy that's making the most of that architecture. Ripple recently secured a key license to offer regulated crypto payments in Dubai, a major international financial hub, and it has already onboarded a few clients after getting the approval.

It's also in the process of getting similar permissions in many other global financial hubs so as to increase the chain's addressable market. And securing that regulatory clarity to create bank-grade on-ramps to its network is exactly what institutional users require to commit real volumes and workflows.

The coin's tokenomics and supply also support the long-term thesis for an investment. XRP's maximum supply is 100 billion, which is gradually being released from escrow at regular intervals. Thus, investors won't get their value significantly diluted over time.

But could the coin make investors millions?

Its market cap is currently upward of $180.2 billion. For that to dramatically increase, XRP would need to process a large portion of the global money transfer market, as well as onboard billions of capital from the traditional financial sector for management on the XRPL. It's certainly possible for those things to happen, but only over a protracted period of time, and in the absence of strong competition. That means that you should not bet on it happening.

Dogecoin can still run

Dogecoin's edge is its mindshare, which is unparalleled among meme coins and certainly one of the largest in the crypto sector in general.

In risk-on markets, it can rally sharply as attention snowballs, sometimes outpacing projects with vastly richer fundamentals, like XRP. While there's no utility to owning Dogecoin, that hasn't stopped it from gaining in value over time. In some sense, it's that very property which keeps investors coming back for more, even though its crashes can be even more frightening than its run-ups are thrilling.

One big fly in the ointment is that its supply issuance schedule is bad for holders over the long term. A fixed 5 billion new DOGE are issued per year, so holders see their value consistently diluted. There is no hard cap on the coin's total issuance; the value proposition, to the extent that there is one, therefore leans more on the coin's culture remaining in vogue.

The challenge is thus durably creating and capturing economic value beyond periodic hype. Discussions about adding deeper utility have persisted for years in Dogecoin's developer community, but most monetization pathways remain tentative compared to chains that already serve institutional workflows. In other words, Dogecoin can absolutely surge when big-picture trends are permissive and attention is high, but sustaining those gains without a hard cap or a cemented set of real-economy uses is harder.

If you're looking for long-term compounding, predictable issuance without a ceiling is a structural headwind relative to capped-supply assets. That does not preclude strong runs, but it does raise the bar for calling it a millionaire maker from here.

There's no need to overthink this one

Realistically, neither of these assets is likely to mint new millionaires from small stakes, as both are already quite large and probably can't grow by the 100x that'd be necessary to really make new investors rich. But if you forced me to choose the more likely millionaire maker from today's levels, and to say which I think would be the better asset for building wealth, I would pick XRP by a mile for both.

It has a clearer path to sustained, non-speculative demand via payments plumbing, bank-friendly regulatory compliance controls, and growing regulatory footholds, all of which are paired with a defined supply regime that won't dilute holders' value.

In contrast, Dogecoin has the bigger five-year highlight reel and can (and probably will) still pop impressively in risk-on periods, but its open-ended supply and still-nascent utility make it less likely to reliably compound in value over time. So consider an investment in XRP -- but keep it small as you diversify your portfolio into more traditional investments -- and hold off on even thinking about Dogecoin until it can offer some real utility, if it ever does.

Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.