These two coins aren’t necessarily in competition with each other.
There’s plenty of growth in the crypto sector, so it’s no surprise that investors look to the prospects of top coins like XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) and Chainlink (CRYPTO: LINK) in search of the one investment that can make them millions.
But do either of these coins have enough gas in the tank to actually be powerful engines of wealth creation, and is one a better pick than the other?
At roughly $3.35 per coin (as of July 18), XRP has a market cap of almost $200 billion.
A 10-fold gain from here would vault its value to $2 trillion, putting it in the same ballpark as Bitcoin. That’s not impossible, but it assumes a colossal influx of new capital. Of course, at that point, even if you had invested $10,000, it still wouldn’t make you a millionaire.
But the coin’s odds of making investors richer are still very good, even if it can’t make them millions.
XRP’s strengths are its appeal to institutional investors, who are its target audience, and its backing by Ripple, the company that issues it.
Those investors are looking for inexpensive and quick ways of managing their assets, not to mention access to yield from their stablecoin holdings and access to liquidity from lenders. XRP offers all those things. It also helps banks and institutional currency traders avoid exchange fees, as well as money transfer fees that they would otherwise pay when using legacy technologies.
Ripple’s technology strategy with the chain is to bake regulatory compliance tools directly into the XRP protocol, making it more palatable for banks and institutional investors that want highly streamlined solutions.
As long as there are asset holders with large sums of capital that aren’t on the blockchain, XRP has a potential pool of users and capital with which to expand. That’s likely to drive a lot of growth during the coming years, assuming that Ripple continues to correctly match its tech with what its audience wants.
Whereas XRP is essentially a fintech targeted at institutions, Chainlink’s scope is more limited.
Its pitch is to be the middleware that provides the data sources (“oracles”) that let blockchains talk to each other, and to traditional finance. It’s a platform that enables a blockchain app developer to incorporate information such as stock prices into smart contracts meant to run on a chain, among many other possible implementations.
