Better Cryptocurrency to Buy With $4,000 and Hold for a Decade: XRP vs. Solana

If you have $4,000 sitting in your savings account that you accumulated gradually after covering your regular expenses and emergency needs, you may want to reconsider what that money is really doing for you. If it has simply been sitting there untouched, it could be losing value over time due to inflation.

A better choice would be to allocate it to today's cryptocurrency leaders, such as XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) and Solana (CRYPTO: SOL), which are often viewed as leading projects in the digital asset space. However, that choice depends on how each cryptocurrency is positioned to handle the current and future needs of its target users over the next decade or so.

Let's dive in.

Image source: Getty Images.

XRP is a focused bet

In the long run, XRP wins if more financial institutions use it, directly or indirectly, as plumbing for processing payments or for managing tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).

In case you aren't familiar, tokenization is the act of representing an asset's ownership data as a crypto token so it can move and settle on a blockchain. By some estimates, the tokenized asset sector will reach $16 trillion by 2030, up from around $24.8 billion today. And that means even a small victory in tokenized assets would make XRP a lot more valuable 10 years from now.

Today, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) hosts only $449 million in tokenized assets. Nonetheless, Ripple, the company that issues XRP, has leaned into developing regulatory compliance tools so as to make the network a more appealing place to manage and trade tokenized stocks, bonds, and commodities. Those tools are slated to become more sophisticated this year, with new provisions for conducting confidential transactions and verifying transactors' identities.

While that's helping to bring more tokenized capital from institutional financial players to its chain today, over the next 10 years, it could pay off even more. Early adopters could serve as social proof of XRPL's value as a financial tool for regulated operators.

Solana is leading today, but it might stumble

Solana aims to be a high-throughput, low-fee chain. On the tokenization side, the chain already hosts $1.7 billion in tradeable assets.

Where Solana looks especially interesting is in tokenized stocks, where its speed and low transaction fees matter the most. The catch is that tokenized stocks and other regulated assets need strong compliance tooling, which isn't something that Solana has nailed down as efficiently as XRP at the protocol level at this juncture, despite substantial efforts and a small ecosystem of third-party compliance tooling. That means if you invest your $4,000 in this coin, you'll be taking on a bit more regulatory and execution risk because you're counting on asset issuers to keep onboarding capital and for regulators to tolerate it.

Of course, Solana's compliance features could catch up, but they don't appear to be as much of a focus for the chain as they are on the XRPL.

So, which is the better coin to invest $4,000 in and then hold for a decade?

Conservative investors should pick XRP, as it has its ducks in a row regarding how its chain will relate to regulators. More aggressive investors who can handle higher uncertainty should pick Solana, as it has a large lead in total asset value today despite its weaker regulatory posture.

Alex Carchidi has positions in Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Solana and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.