Which Is More Likely to Hit $3 by 2030: XRP (Ripple) or Shiba Inu?

Three dollars sounds like a pretty low number for a well-known cryptocurrency like XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) or Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB) to reach, right? Actually, both coins are likely to struggle to reach that target -- but one is guaranteed to struggle a lot more than the other, to put it lightly.

Shiba Inu's problem is its supply policy

Today, Shiba Inu trades near $0.000006 with a circulating supply of around 589 trillion coins. At its peak in late 2021, its price was $0.00008.

Image source: Getty Images.

To state the obvious, for it to reach $3, every one of those tokens would need to be worth $3. That implies a market cap of roughly $1.77 quadrillion. The entire global crypto market is worth near $2.5 trillion. In 2025, the value of the entire global economy was worth $117 trillion.

The coin's primary approach to solving the issue of its large outstanding supply is token burning, a process in which coins are permanently removed from circulation. On the Shibarium, its little-used Layer-2 network, 70% of all transaction fees get converted into Shiba Inu tokens and destroyed.

But daily burn volumes are vanishingly small relative to the hundreds of trillions of outstanding coins. In the 30-day period ending April 15, just 166,826,778 SHIB were burned as a result of activity on the Shibarium. At that rate, it will take many, many years for the burn to result in any meaningful price pressure to the upside, and that's assuming the pace doesn't slow down.

So it's effectively impossible for Shiba Inu to ever reach $3, barring a major overhaul of its token-burning function or an astronomical increase in the amount of activity on its chain -- and there's presently no evidence of either of those two things happening.

XRP already crossed the $3 line once

The scenario is entirely different for XRP, which hit an all-time high of $3.65 in July 2025 and is now priced near $1.35.

A return to $3 requires a gain of about 122%, bringing its market cap to roughly $184 billion. That's ambitious during a bear market like now, but it'd be fairly doable within a normal crypto bull cycle. The main question is about what would be driving the move.

Ripple, the company that issues XRP, spent around $2.4 billion on acquisitions of at least four crypto businesses in 2025, the largest being Hidden Road, a prime brokerage. That brokerage officially joined the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) directory in March 2026, thereby connecting the XRP Ledger (XRPL) to the traditional financial clearing system and enabling the chain to perform real work as financial plumbing for financial institutions.

In other words, XRP is going to be used to perform real financial work, which will contribute to its value. It's thus pretty likely to regain $3 again in the future, unlike Shiba Inu.

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.