There’s reason to believe that XRP could still come out ahead in the long run.
Real world asset (RWA) tokenization, which is a fancy way of describing the process of putting the legal rights to bonds, commodities, stocks, or even real estate directly on a blockchain, is turning into crypto’s newest gold rush.
The entrant with the biggest shovels and most capital right now is Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), and that’s putting serious pressure on XRP (CRYPTO: XRP), whose investment thesis depends far more heavily on winning this very niche. Let’s dig in and explore why one coin’s good fortune doubles as the other’s headache, at least for now.
First, let’s consider the scoreboard in this matchup.
Ethereum hosts about $7.5 billion in tokenized RWAs, which accounts for almost 60% of everything in the sector that’s emplaced on public chains. That alone signals significant network effects at work, but the bigger news is who’s arriving next. BlackRock’s money‑market fund called BUIDL, launched in March 2024 and now worth $2.9 billion, just became acceptable collateral at two major crypto exchanges, cementing Ethereum’s role as the primary on-ramp for the fund.
Institutional money only moves once it is confident that its intended destination is a place that will be compliant with the necessary financial regulations against money laundering. That’s where Ethereum’s ERC‑3643 identity‑aware token standard adds fresh credibility by baking important compliance features directly into the asset, albeit in a somewhat technologically clunky way. The standard, while optional to implement, does provide at least a measure of reassurance for conservative institutions that some of their bases will be covered.
All of this adds to Ethereum’s other value drivers in decentralized finance (DeFi) and other segments.
Instead, tokenization layers another fee‑generating stream on top of an already diversified ecosystem. Assuming even the low end of Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) $16 trillion RWA market forecast for 2030 is hit, a 10% slice of the market flowing through Ethereum would multiply today’s on‑chain RWA base more than 20-fold.
For long‑term ETH investors, that’s practically a bonus for the coin’s value rather than an existential change.
Staking yields would rise, transaction fees would broaden, and protocol revenue would diversify, but the entire segment would still just be one of many in the ecosystem. And that makes competition for a share of the pie very bullish, as victory is not needed for the chain to flourish.
