Cryptocurrencies, known for boom and bust volatility, can dramatically outperform stocks.
Long-term investing is the key to sustainable returns in financial markets because it smooths out the volatility to allow an asset’s fundamental story to play out. This concept is crucial for crypto because of its extreme volatility. Let’s dig deeper into the pros and cons of an asset like XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) to see what the next three years might have in store.
It has been 16 years since Bitcoin launched the cryptocurrency industry. Since then, market participants have had plenty of time to analyze the long-term performance of these assets. Some interesting trends have emerged.
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For starters, there is a clear difference between the performance of large blue chip cryptocurrencies, which tend to slowly gain value over time, compared to the more speculative side of the market, which often booms and busts with no clear long-term growth trend.
With its market cap of $171 billion, XRP is the fourth-largest cryptocurrency, behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether (with which it often trades places). Its size and age (XRP was founded in 2012) will give it more brand recognition and trust compared to the sea of newer assets, even if they outperform its raw technical capabilities.
Cryptocurrencies are notoriously hard to value because, unlike a stock or bond, they aren’t attached to real-world businesses with revenue or profit. XRP’s development team, Ripple Labs, has worked to maximize its project’s potential for real-world utility. Historically, it has focused on disrupting the international payments market, where XRP tokens can be used as a bridge currency between different fiat currencies.
For example, suppose you want to send U.S. dollars to Japan. In that case, you can use dollars to buy XRP and use it to purchase Japanese yen, bypassing costly intermediaries like bank wires or money transfer platforms like Western Union and MoneyGram. Although most cryptocurrencies can fill this role, XRP stands out because of its name recognition and extremely low fee of just 0.00001 XRP token per transaction.
Image source: Getty Images.
Ripple Labs has worked to further integrate itself into the fintech landscape with a new dollar-pegged stablecoin called RLUSD, which has attracted interest from mainstream financial institutions like Singapore’s DBS Bank, which plans to use the asset to offer clients crypto lending products. While RLUSD is distinct from XRP, both assets use the same blockchain ledger, which means adoption of RLUSD could boost demand for XRP (for paying transaction fees on the network).
In July, Ripple took things a step further by applying for a U.S. national bank charter. This move could give its cryptocurrency assets further legitimacy and make it easier for the developer to settle payments and bypass intermediary banks when developing its fintech products.
During the coming years, XRP’s growth story will likely depend on both macroeconomic forces and asset-specific trends. On the macro side, it may benefit from falling trust in the U.S. dollar. The dollar index has declined a whopping 10% year to date. Political uncertainty and rising national debt could send it even lower, encouraging investors to diversify into other stores of value like XRP and other blue chip cryptocurrencies.
Most importantly, Ripple Labs’ focus on real-world utility and new projects like stablecoins and financial services will help XRP stay relevant in the face of an increasingly crowded and competitive crypto industry. The asset looks poised to outperform during the next three years and beyond.
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Will Ebiefung has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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