Could Solana Flip XRP in 3 Years?

XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) has a larger market cap than Solana (CRYPTO: SOL), at $83 billion versus Solana's $48 billion. During the coming years, both assets are going to be competing for the same prize, which is to be the infrastructure layer for the trillions of dollars in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), or the ownership of things like stocks and commodities converted into crypto tradeable on blockchains.

Solana has quite a few meaningful edges in that race at the moment. Could it end up being worth more than XRP by early 2029 as a result?

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Solana is already winning where it matters most

Solana's most important features are its speed and its low costs, both of which make it a natural fit for handling tokenized assets that need to move around at mass scale, like stocks, bonds, and commodities contracts.

The chain has already positioned itself as something closer to an internet-native stock exchange than a crypto chain. About $272 million in tokenized stocks are already circulating in its ecosystem, up 14% in the 30-day period ended March 5.

By some estimates, the total value of all tokenized stocks will rise to more than $38 billion by 2035, which, given that they're worth about $1 billion today, indicates that there's a major growth segment waiting to be claimed.

Plus, when that value changes hands, the transaction needs to settle in something less volatile than a stock, like a stablecoin. Solana has plenty of those, too, with $15.5 billion in stablecoin capital on its chain. And every transaction or swap on Solana requires spending some of the coin along the way.

Thus, for Solana, the bull case to flip XRP is that it becomes the centralized stock exchange within the crypto sector, which is to say, it becomes a chain where equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and institutional funds trade 24/7 at a cost approaching zero.

It won't even need to win 100% of the emerging tokenized assets market to see its price rise a tremendous amount as a result of competing. And, given how close its market cap is to XRP's, capturing even some growth, especially if it comes at the expense of XRP's share in tokenized assets, would be more than enough for Solana to flip it.

So, yes, Solana very well could flip XRP, but that's not the whole story.

XRP has the compliance moat, and it's accelerating

Despite the above, Solana's road to actually surpassing XRP is not without plenty of obstacles.

As of now, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) only has about $453 million in tokenized assets, which are kept on the chain for trading purposes rather than only for record keeping. Similarly, its stablecoin base is just $432 million. The largest slice of XRP's tradeable tokenized assets are U.S. Treasury bills and bonds, which are valued at about $294 million.

This isn't a setup that looks like it's about to threaten Solana's future growth or prevent it from becoming more valuable, at least not on the surface. But XRP, like Solana, is fast, and has low transaction fees. One differentiator that is likely to help it to do quite well in tokenized assets is its compliance tooling, which is focused on financial institutions, and which is far more extensive than anything Solana offers.

Its compliance infrastructure is baked into the blockchain rather than being implemented via third party services. Therefore, asset managers that want to issue tokenized bonds, stocks, or government securities don't have to assemble a compliance stack from scratch with the XRPL.

During the next three years, as well as in the long run, that will probably make XRP a far larger recipient of capital inflows related to tokenization compared to Solana. And, for the record, Ripple, the company that issues XRP, is also a bit ahead of the game when it comes to developing strong relationships with banks and other financial institutions.

So, although Solana will probably be doing very well as tokenization starts to take off, it's missing the ingredient that the players with the most capital will be looking for, whereas XRP has it.

I still expect that at some point, Solana probably will be more valuable than XRP, as it aims to have a much larger and broader ecosystem rather than a tightly targeted one catering to the financial industry, as XRP has. But don't bet on it happening before 2029.

Alex Carchidi has positions in Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Solana and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.