What's the Better Buy Right Now With $1,000: XRP, or Cardano?

If you're looking to invest $1,000 into a somewhat less-than-safe crypto investment, assets like XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) and Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA) are probably on your radar already.

But which one of the pair is going to help your hard-earned cash grow the most? To me, there's a very clear answer.

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XRP is performing a real job already

XRP is a coin that's essentially a medium of exchange with a blockchain, the XRP Ledger (XRPL). XRPL is itself catered to the needs of financial institutions that want to streamline the performance of certain everyday tasks like international money transfers, among many others.

For its investment thesis to play out, there thus needs to be a steady inflow of capital from those institutions, as well as some proof that the capital is being put to work on the ledger. Inflows and on-chain activity become higher value for holders because transaction costs must be paid in XRP, and wallets on the network must be funded with some XRP in order to continue existing.

With that set of criteria in mind, the XRPL processed 2.4 million transactions on Feb. 25, across 13,508 active accounts. It also had $416 million in stablecoins parked on its chain, which indicates that there's a real base of capital to tap for liquidity and various financial tasks.

So, XRP obviously has some traction already. If its issuer, Ripple, continues to develop its platform technology, it's reasonable to expect that it'll get at least a bit more traction in the future.

Cardano can't find users

Unlike XRP, Cardano is intended to be a general-purpose smart contract chain, and it doesn't necessarily target financial institutions. Its reputation is built on its development process, which centers around a somewhat academic (and vaguely scientific) set of methods for collaborative consensus-building and peer review.

The problem is that these good-on-paper practices do not automatically translate into sustained use by anyone. The chain only incurred $2,080 in fees on Feb. 25, and it only has $34 million in stablecoins on its chain. Furthermore, its transaction volume is trending downward, not up, and it seldom processes more than a few hundred thousand transactions per week.

So, compared to XRP, Cardano isn't a good pick for a $1,000 investment, as it hasn't demonstrated that it's useful for any specific group of people or any purpose. If you do buy XRP, make sure that the rest of your crypto portfolio is sufficiently diversified with safer investments. Betting on Cardano's adoption path to continue taking off is far from a certainty.

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.