Where Will XRP Be in 3 Years?

XRP's Regulatory Challenges and Market Position

XRP, the cryptocurrency associated with Ripple Labs, has made significant strides in overcoming some of its most pressing regulatory challenges. This progress has led to the approval of its first spot price ETFs, marking a pivotal moment for the token. However, despite these developments, XRP lacks clear near-term catalysts that could justify a substantial increase in its price.

On July 17, 2025, XRP reached a record high of $3.65, representing a gain of over 480% compared to the previous 12 months. However, as of today, it trades at approximately $2. This fluctuation highlights the volatile nature of the cryptocurrency market and raises questions about whether XRP can rebound and achieve new highs in the next three years.

Regulatory Hurdles Overcome by XRP

XRP was created in 2012 by the founders of Ripple Labs, a fintech company focused on blockchain-based payments. The initial supply of 100 billion tokens was pre-minted on the XRP Ledger, making it distinct from other cryptocurrencies that can be mined or staked. Ripple initially held 80 billion of these tokens, but it sold some to fund its expansion, which led to a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2020.

The SEC accused Ripple of selling unlicensed securities, resulting in the loss of many top customers and the delisting of XRP from major crypto exchanges. This situation kept the price of XRP below $1 for most of the period from 2020 to 2024.

In August, the lawsuit concluded with a lighter-than-expected fine for Ripple. The court ruled that XRP was not an unlicensed security when sold to investors on public exchanges, but it still qualified as one when sold to institutional investors. Following this decision, major crypto exchanges relisted XRP, and several asset management firms submitted applications for XRP spot price ETFs. These ETFs, including Bitwise XRP and Canary XRP ETF, were approved to start trading in late November.

Additionally, Ripple submitted an application for a U.S. bank charter in July. If successful, this could transform Ripple into a full-fledged digital bank, potentially increasing the use of XRP for financial transactions.

Why XRP Has Pulled Back

Despite its regulatory breakthroughs, XRP is not widely used for mainstream payments. Instead, it primarily functions as a bridge currency to expedite certain financial transactions on Ripple. When users want to make a transaction across different fiat currencies, they are converted to XRP on the ledger and then back to the desired fiat currency, making the process faster and cheaper than traditional SWIFT transfers.

However, XRP cannot be mined like Bitcoin, and its ledger does not natively support smart contracts, which are essential for developing decentralized applications (dApps) and other crypto assets. While XRP supports lightweight "hooks" for simpler applications, it recently added Ethereum-compatible "sidechains" to integrate more complex dApps with its platform.

Due to these limitations, it is challenging to assess XRP's long-term value based on scarcity or growth potential as a developer platform. This may explain why many investors took profits over the past five months as the broader crypto market cooled down.

Future Prospects for XRP

For XRP to bounce back over the next three years, it must achieve wider adoption for mainstream payments and attract more institutional investors. However, breaking out of this bottleneck could be difficult given the competition from larger cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, which are often pegged to the U.S. dollar for stability.

Ripple has also launched its own stablecoin, Ripple USD, in December. This stablecoin could be used more frequently than XRP as a bridge currency, especially if Ripple expands into a full digital bank.

In the broader crypto market, I believe blue-chip tokens like Bitcoin and Ether will rise over the next three years as smaller tokens fade away. While XRP is not yet a blue-chip token, it is also not a smaller meme coin like Shiba Inu. Therefore, I expect XRP's price to gradually stabilize over the next three years, but I remain uncertain about whether it will rebound and set fresh highs without clearer catalysts.

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