On paper, the last 12 months should have been a banner year for XRP (XRP 4.47%). Between the resolution of an SEC lawsuit and the launch of seven spot funds like the Bitwise XRP ETF, the banking token had a lot going for it.
Instead, XRP is down nearly 40% since May 2025 and, despite topping $3.50 last July, now trades around just $1.32.
Some investors are wringing their hands, worried things will only get worse, while others are eying the price hungrily, seeing the dip as a golden buying opportunity.
So, who is right? To answer that, let's look at a few scenarios and what a $1,000 investment might look like in five years.
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First, though, what if you had invested $1,000 five years ago? What would it look like today?
In May 2021, XRP was trading at $0.90. It's up 46.4% since then, so you'd now be sitting on $1,464 -- not bad, but not great. The S&P 500 returned nearly twice that over those five years.
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It gets a whole lot juicier if you go back a decade. If you had bought XRP in 2016, you would have netted an incredible 22,540% return on your investment. That $1,000 would now be worth more than $226,000. Check out the wild growth in the chart below.
Unfortunately, that kind of growth isn't happening again, no matter how well the token does moving forward. Still, in the best-case scenario, there's a lot of growth that could happen.
Let's assume that Ripple, the company behind XRP, continues to find success and adoption of its technology grows rapidly. In five years, it could be a major player in global finance, especially in cross-border transactions.
In the bull case, I'm assuming Ripple's success flows neatly downhill and translates into XRP's success. In this scenario, I could see XRP around $4 a token.
In a more sober base case, Ripple finds similar, if slightly more limited, success. Its adoption has continued, but it's heavily concentrated in cross-border transactions, especially when less popular currencies are being exchanged.
And in this scenario, Ripple's stablecoin, RLUSD, has become the primary bridge asset for these transactions -- something I discuss in more detail here.
This switch is already the actual trend, and in my view, it is likely to accelerate. And if it does, the narrative that has been sustaining XRP's price up to this point weakens.
In this case, I see XRP having barely moved from today, essentially flat. I'm going to call this $1.50.
Even in the bear case, I see Ripple still doing well. But here, RLUSD essentially replaces XRP as the bridge asset of choice and the narrative -- and the hype -- collapses.
I could see XRP trading where it did for years, well below $1. I'll say $0.40.
Here are the three cases laid out in a table.
I believe the most likely outcome is somewhere between the base and bear cases. I firmly believe that XRP's price has almost completely decoupled from Ripple and its success. So, despite my belief that Ripple itself will do well, I think XRP is in for some tough years ahead, and a $1,000 investment today will be three digits in five years.