Which Will Double Faster? XRP (Ripple) vs. Shiba Inu

Key Points

• XRP is being used in financial institutions worldwide for a few purposes.

• Shiba Inu is a meme coin from yesteryear that has a blockchain attached.

• Anything could happen under the right conditions, but there's a clear winner here.

• 10 stocks we like better than XRP ›

There are two assets in particular that continue to ignite investors' imaginations when they're hunting for coins that could deliver a magical 100% return: XRP (CRYPTO: XRP), the settlement-layer darling of international banks, and Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB), a dog meme coin that once rocketed to the moon on little more than internet enthusiasm.

Why might anyone think that doubling is a plausible outcome for either?

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XRP's institutional muscle is accumulating fast

At about $3.16 per token, and with a market cap of $191 billion, XRP needs only a hop to reach the $6.30 mark that would count as a clean double, which would require adding another $191 billion in value to its market cap.

The springboard to bridge that gap is its real-world utility, and this coin has plenty of it. In short, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) is gaining real traction around the world as a financial tool, and with the marketing help of Ripple, the company that issues XRP.

Ripple's On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) system, which settles using XRP, added a smattering of new Middle Eastern financial institutions in 2025, bringing faster cross-border settlements to corridors that still rely on costly and slow legacy infrastructure like SWIFT. Banks that plug into the XRPL to settle transfers must hold some XRP for liquidity buffers, quietly shrinking the coin's float.

Meanwhile, transfer volumes keep climbing. But the chain's utility is now expanding beyond just being a payment processor.

In mid-July, the United Arab Emirates-based tokenization platform Ctrl Alt picked Ripple's custody stack and the XRPL to fractionalize and tokenize Dubai property deeds, giving investors access to bite-size pieces of local real estate. The same rails could eventually tokenize up to $16 billion of real estate on its chain by 2033 in Dubai alone. If even a slice of the larger global property tokenization market value lands on XRP for management, the ledger's native coin will capture a significant structural bid, and its price will rise over the long term.

Assuming steady progress on either the tokenization front or the payment processing front, a sprint to the mid-$6s for XRP looks reachable within a year or so.

Shiba Inu's ceiling might be higher, but don't expect to reach it

Shiba Inu trades near $0.0000136. To double, it has to get to $0.0000272, a gain that sounds tiny but requires roughly $7 billion in fresh market cap at today's supply.

Notably, that's a lot less distance than XRP has to travel in absolute terms. As it's a meme coin that's prone to explosive moves upward under the right combination of market conditions and investor enthusiasm, Shiba Inu doesn't necessarily need to rely on its fundamentals to succeed, as it lacks them.

Nonetheless, the coin's boosters tout Shibarium, the project's layer-2 (L2) network, as the growth engine. But the chain is barely used, and there's not much evidence that new users are flocking to it. So there is no way that Shibarium will be a magnet for capital that sticks around, though it could still attract speculators.

Therefore, it is completely understandable why institutional interest in this coin is minimal. That leaves an unpredictable burst of hype as the only credible driver of a doubling.

The real project easily wins here

Both coins could eventually double, but the odds significantly favor XRP doing it first. It's also far more likely to retain any big growth it experiences, as it isn't dependent on highly fickle investor sentiment in the way that Shiba Inu is.

Ripple keeps stacking fundamental demand drivers, like bank transfer corridors, tokenized asset custody, and the potential approval of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) holding XRP that pull coins off exchanges and into working capital roles. Shiba Inu's roadmap, in contrast, banks on reigniting retail enthusiasm and fixing Shibarium's user-growth slump, all without any concrete set of steps that could credibly accomplish those goals.

Thus, for patient capital seeking the likelier shot at a 100% gain in the foreseeable future, XRP looks like the better option by far.

Should you invest $1,000 in XRP right now?

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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.