Here's What It Would Take to Make $1 Million With XRP (Ripple) in 5 Years

Key Points

• There are a lot of reasons to be excited about XRP's next few years.
• Competition and macro conditions could still very easily derail its march upward.
• Implementing good investing habits consistently could still lead to big returns here.
• 10 stocks we like better than XRP ›

If you hang around crypto investors long enough, you will hear at least one story that goes like "I bought a few thousand coins back when nobody believed in the asset, forgot about them for a few years, and now I'm retiring early." Most of us have missed a multitude of those once-in-a-lifetime events without even realizing it, and it isn't reasonable to expect to land one. Still, disciplined investing over time can put the same life-changing sums of money on the board, assuming the asset cooperates.

Today, many look to XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) for such returns, both over the short term (perhaps unreasonably) and the longer term. If XRP were to achieve escape velocity, could a determined investor turn steady purchases into a seven-figure stake by summer 2030, five years from now? Let's make a few assumptions and a few calculations to figure it out.

Image source: Getty Images. ## How to get to $1 million

The arithmetic here is fairly straightforward.

Commit $2,000 at the start of every month for five years straight, making 60 purchases in total. At today's $3 price per coin, each purchase bags about 667 XRP, so the running total after five years should be 40,000 XRP.

For that pile of coins to be worth $1 million, the price per coin would need to touch $25. That represents a climb of more than eightfold, or a little more than 730% in terms of price appreciation. By comparison, Bitcoin rose by 883% during the past five years. In other words, our $1 million roadmap for XRP assumes replicating the gains that Bitcoin just delivered, and on about the same timescale.

Still, the target is not entirely unicorn territory if key trends deliver for the chain, like being the home for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) figures that the potential value of tokenized real-world assets could reach $16 trillion by 2030, up from $25 billion today. XRP was designed by its issuer, Ripple, with regulated finance in mind; Ripple's payment network already spans 90 markets and supports 55 currencies.

For a thought experiment, assume XRP captures just 5% of the tokenization pie during the next five years, and it would have $800 billion in additional value parked on its chain. With a fixed supply of 100 billion coins, that alone would imply an $8 price tag before even getting into whether experiencing such inflows would encourage investors to bid up its valuation beyond the underlying value of the new assets on the chain, which they surely would. So one trend alone could power XRP a significant portion of the way toward the price target needed to create millions for holders.

Story ContinuesNow, layer on another major tailwind for inflows, specifically the probable approval of XRP spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Analysts now give XRP a 98% chance of winning U.S. ETF approval before 2026. Spot ETF demand turbocharged Bitcoin's price. If XRP sees even a fraction of the inflows that Bitcoin did, its valuation could become tremendous very quickly.

Finally, there's the price impulse associated with the ongoing development of the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

As the platform itself gains more capabilities, the valuation of the coin will likely increase to account for its additional utility. Ripple keeps adding compliance-friendly bells and whistles, such as automated market makers (AMM) and transaction clawback functions, all aimed at increasing institutional adoption. These features could coax cautious banks or other financial institutions into holding large XRP balances to cut costs and reduce transaction times with its cross-border settlements, shrinking the liquid float available for public trading and pushing up prices.

Put all of these pieces together, and a highly bullish but not implausible scenario of tokenization inflows, ETF demand, and other use cases could push XRP toward, and perhaps through, the $25 marker.

Making these numbers real won't be trivial

There are a handful of obstacles that are likely to prevent XRP from making investors into millionaires during the next five years, even if they don't rule out large gains.

Start with competition. Today, Ethereum still hosts more than half of the $25 billion in tokenized assets on public chains, and it also has the largest capital base of stablecoins on its chain by far, with more than $140 billion in value. XRP's share of the pie is growing, but Ethereum and a half-dozen other upstart networks aren't giving ground for free, and XRP only has $158 million in RWAs on its chain at the moment.

Then there's the macro backdrop.

A gargantuan jump in just five years calls for a rising tide of risk appetite and persistently favorable liquidity conditions, which are highly likely to occur during the next two years, but far less likely to be as good thereafter. If global liquidity eventually tightens, tokenization slows, or ETF inflows disappoint, XRP's climb could stall well short of $25.

Therefore, while investing slowly across five years is a reasonable wager on XRP's long-term utility, expecting the value of your position to mushroom into $1 million that quickly is not. A more conservative game plan is to stretch the time horizon by a few more years, lower your return assumptions, and stay flexible about monthly purchase sizes, especially if XRP rockets early or if there's a dip to buy.

None of this means XRP is unattractive as an investment. Just recognize that the coin's path to $25 in five years is very narrow and winding.

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Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Here's What It Would Take to Make $1 Million With XRP (Ripple) in 5 Years was originally published by The Motley Fool

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