In the next five years, will Ripple (XRP) surpass Bitcoin (BTC) to become the largest crypto asset?

In the crypto market of 2025, Bitcoin (BTC) still firmly holds the throne of "digital gold," but its single narrative of "value storage" is facing challenges from emerging public chains and functional tokens. Meanwhile, in this process, Ripple (XRP), with its fourfold advantages of technical positioning, institutional penetration, regulatory breakthroughs, and market demand, is quietly rewriting the power dynamics of crypto assets. If the current trend continues, within the next five years, the adoption rate of XRP may surpass that of BTC; by the end of this century, it is expected to become the largest and most widely used crypto asset.

Bitcoin (BTC) can be considered the most popular crypto asset in the market. Despite experiencing an incredible phase of popularity, it is still plagued by high transaction times and high costs. Settlements on the BTC network take about 10 minutes, with transaction costs ranging from $2 to $10. In contrast, XRP can complete transaction settlements in a matter of seconds, at a cost that is only a fraction of what it is on the BTC network.

Technical positioning: the dimensional competition from "value storage" to "financial infrastructure". The core narrative of Bitcoin has always revolved around "decentralized value storage", a characteristic that makes it irreplaceable in scenarios of inflation hedging and wealth preservation, but also limits its application boundaries - as a payment tool, Bitcoin's transaction speed (about 7 transactions/second) and fees (over a hundred dollars during peak times) are difficult to meet daily needs; as a "currency", its volatility runs counter to the core attribute of "stability" in currency.

In contrast, the technical positioning of XRP has focused on solving the inefficiencies of global cross-border payments since its inception. Relying on Ripple's XRP Ledger (XRPL), XRP can achieve cross-border payment settlement in seconds (3-5 seconds), with a single transaction cost of only $0.0002, and supports exchange between any fiat and digital currencies. This "payment + bridging" dual function allows it to directly tap into the largest essential scenario in the global financial system—according to World Bank data, the scale of global cross-border payments reached $150 trillion in 2023, while the average settlement time for the traditional SWIFT system takes 2-5 days, with fees as high as 6.3%. The "utility" of XRP is transforming into real demand: by the end of 2024, over 300 financial institutions in more than 50 countries around the world (including Santander Bank, Bank of America, Standard Chartered Bank, etc.) have connected to Ripple's cross-border payment network, processing a total transaction amount exceeding 200 billion USD. This kind of institutional adoption, which is akin to "voting with their feet," is far more capable of driving its actual circulation and value growth than Bitcoin's "faith-based investment."

Institutional Penetration: From "Compliance Confrontation" to "Ecological Co-construction" Strategic Breakthrough In the past two years, the lawsuit between Ripple and the SEC was the biggest risk for XRP, but the "partial victory" ruling by the court in July 2024 (which determined that the programmatic sale of XRP does not constitute securities, but institutional sales may be in violation) has cleared key obstacles for it. Ripple seized this opportunity to accelerate its strategic adjustment: on one hand, by providing XRP liquidity to compliant institutions through "On-Demand Liquidity" (ODL) services, avoiding direct sales to ordinary users; on the other hand, collaborating with central banks to explore the cross-border interconnection of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) - in March 2025, Ripple announced its cooperation with the Central Bank of the UAE and the Reserve Bank of India to test a CBDC bridging platform based on XRPL, marking XRP's formal entry into the "core circle" of the sovereign financial system.

In contrast to Bitcoin, although companies like MicroStrategy and Tesla have included it on their balance sheets, its characteristics of being "borderless and censorship-resistant" naturally conflict with the regulatory demands of various countries regarding capital flow control. Major global economies (such as the United States and the European Union) are gradually incorporating Bitcoin into regulatory frameworks (such as ETF approvals), but there remains a constant vigilance regarding its "monetary attributes." This "compliance ceiling" results in Bitcoin's institutional adoption largely remaining at the "asset allocation" level rather than as a "production tool," making it difficult to bind deeply to real financial needs like XRP.

According to data from on-chain analysis company Santiment, in the first half of 2025, the number of institutional wallet addresses for XRP increased by 230% year-on-year, with holdings accounting for 18% of the circulating supply (BTC is 22%); however, the daily active address count (DAU) for XRP grew by 45% (BTC only 8%), indicating that XRP's user base is shifting from "whale accumulation" to "institutions + small and medium users," while BTC's user growth has stagnated.

Market Demand: The "financial equality" dividend in emerging markets. There are still 1.7 billion people worldwide who are not covered by traditional banks (World Bank 2024 data), with over 60% distributed in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and Africa. These regions face two major pain points: first, the high cost of cross-border remittances (average rate of 7%, with some countries reaching 15%), and second, severe fluctuations in local currencies (for example, the Nigerian Naira depreciated over 40% in 2023). The characteristics of XRP, such as "low cost, high speed, and multi-currency exchange," provide these users with a "decentralized" financial solution.

Taking Southeast Asia as an example, in Q2 2025, Indonesia's e-wallet DANA partnered with Ripple to launch the "XRP Cross-Border Remittance Channel," reducing the remittance time from Indonesia to the Philippines from 2 days to 3 seconds, and the cost from 3% to 0.1%. Within 3 months of the service launch, it covered 2 million users, with a monthly transaction volume exceeding 500 million USD. Similar models are being replicated in markets such as India, Pakistan, and Kenya, while Bitcoin faces challenges in these price-sensitive regions due to high fees and volatility.

More importantly, the financial infrastructure in emerging markets is still under construction, and the acceptance of "new technologies" is much higher than in mature markets. Once XRP completes "user education" by addressing real pain points (such as cross-border payments), its role as a bridging tool between "local currency - digital currency - other fiat currencies" may further penetrate into scenarios such as supply chain finance and digital identity, creating a network effect of a "financial ecosystem"—this incremental market of "from 0 to 1" is a blank space that BTC is difficult to reach.

Supply Logic: From "Deflation Myth" to "Demand-Driven" Value Reconstruction Bitcoin's "21 million total supply" and "halving mechanism" have shaped its "digital gold" scarcity narrative, but have also led to its value being highly dependent on "external capital inflows"—when market risk appetite declines, BTC often falls first (for example, during the 2022 crypto winter, BTC dropped over 65%, far exceeding XRP's 40%).

The supply mechanism of XRP is more flexible: the total supply is 100 billion coins, of which about 50% has been destroyed through the market (Ripple regularly destroys transaction fees), and the current circulating supply is about 48 billion coins. More importantly, the value of XRP is directly linked to "cross-border payment demand"—as the transaction volume processed by the Ripple network increases, the market's "liquidity demand" for XRP (for payment settlement) and "reserve demand" (for exchanging other currencies) will continue to rise. This "demand-driven" model makes its price more likely to form a positive cycle with actual use cases.

For example, in the first half of 2025, the monthly average transaction volume of the Ripple network increased by 120% year-on-year, driving the share of "practical demand" for XRP from 15% in 2023 to 35% (with the remainder being investment demand). When practical demand becomes dominant, the value of XRP will no longer rely on "speculative hype", but on the scale of real financial services, making this "endogenous growth" model more sustainable. The inevitability of moving from "follower" to "leader" lies in the greatness of Bitcoin, which defined the concept of "decentralized currency"; however, its "single function" and "high threshold" limit its growth potential. The ambition of XRP is to become the "bridge" connecting traditional finance and digital finance by solving the most painful issue of "cross-border payments" in the global financial system. With the deepening of institutional collaboration, penetration into emerging markets, and improvement of regulatory frameworks, the adoption rate of XRP is expected to surpass BTC within the next five years, and by the end of this century, with the dual advantages of "practicality + universality", it is set to become the largest and most widely used Crypto Asset.

The irony of history lies in the fact that disruptors are often not "perfect" technologies, but rather solutions that "solve problems". When XRP enabled 2 billion people globally to complete cross-border remittances via mobile phones for the first time, it may have become the new "infrastructure" of the crypto world — and this is precisely the ultimate logic of its surpassing Bitcoin.