XRP and Solana are absolutely destroying crypto today, and in my opinion they're much worse than you might even think. To me they sit at opposite ends of the exact same thing that's wrong with crypto. Before I get into them, let's talk about what's right with crypto so we have something to contrast them against.
What's right with crypto is making a peer-to-peer currency that you and I can use to exchange value while cutting out the middleman. That's why I got into Bitcoin in 2014. It was so exciting that you and I could transact without some government, bank, or centralized entity getting between us, and that we could use it worldwide. Then you've got the Internet Computer Protocol, which in my view has the best technology in crypto. You can run entire websites fully on-chain. You can have an entire community, like my OpenChat community, where people post and I do giveaways. That is incredible technology. And then you have XRP and Solana.
XRP: a decade old with almost no real adoption
Let's start with XRP. XRP has a roughly $136 billion market cap, and despite being almost as old as Bitcoin, with the chart on CoinMarketCap going back to 2013, it still has around $100 billion left in token unlocks. It just reached its all-time high in US dollars that it previously hit back in 2017. But it gets worse than that.
If you look at the actual XRP ledger on XRP Scan, in my experience all the XRP hype is blatantly fraudulent. They use bots to push their videos. I have firsthand proof of this. When I made an XRP hype video two years ago, bots pushed my video so hard and got it out there to all these people. That's what's happening across the board. Many of these XRP videos are only being seen because of bots, and then people are getting tricked by those bots into buying XRP.
If you look at the actual data on the XRP ledger, you'll see the number of payments from one account to another has gone nowhere in a year. The payment volume and almost all the metrics have stalled. Active accounts have ticked up a bit recently with all the XRP hype, but XRP burned as fees, which is one of the best metrics you could look at, has gone nowhere with hardly any growth in the last year. Fees are one of the hardest metrics to fake because they're expensive.
The reality of the chain is that it's over a decade old and almost nothing has kicked in like a network effect. It's just this huge valuation crypto that pays people to talk about it, that pays to be in positions like being considered for part of Trump's crypto team. They pay and push bots, but I don't see them adding any real value to the world. This is a centralized entity, Ripple, holding a bunch of this XRP, and there's a company with a stock behind it too. So there's almost nothing meaningfully decentralized about it, and in my view it offers no meaningful value to the world.
And yet this is one of the top cryptocurrencies, one that has sucked hundreds of billions of dollars of retail money into it instead of into real technology that can actually make a difference, like ICP. By comparison, XRP has a market cap more than 630 times larger than ICP. All these people hype up XRP, but how many of them have ever even used the blockchain? If you've bought XRP on an exchange, you more than likely have never actually created a transaction on the XRP blockchain, which would explain these metrics. When you've got people just trading on centralized accounts, the money is all sitting in those accounts and doesn't actually move on-chain, which perfectly explains the metrics we're seeing.
That's XRP: a crypto that's over a decade old with almost no real adoption, that's almost all hype, and that has tricked people into throwing money into something I consider fundamentally worthless. The hype videos repeatedly say the same things they did years ago, and almost none of it has come to pass.
Solana: meme coins, bots, and a second rug pull
Then we move on to Solana. This was a project pushed by the FTX team, the criminals behind FTX who were lying, cheating, and stealing, doing all kinds of things with crypto investors' money. Solana was the coin they pushed to line their pockets, and they already rug pulled investors on it once when FTX crashed. It blew up, then rugged everybody down to $10, and now it's blown up again. The FTX bankruptcy estate has a bunch of it that it needs to dump, so they need the price high.
Solana is another example, on the opposite end from XRP, of what's destroying crypto. In my view it's not decentralized at all. There's hardly any transparency as to who's actually behind the team. And what are people actually doing on Solana? Mostly trading meme coins. Solana is absolutely infested with bots. I'd estimate probably 95 percent or more of the traffic on Solana is bots, just swapping meme coins automatically. People copy trading, people paying to send one influencer money to push some meme coin, a whole bunch of people investing in absolute garbage, useless currencies like Trump coin. To me this adds no value to the world. It purely extracts value from naive crypto investors, and it's gotten to be one of the top coins on the market today. That was just another meme coin pumped on Solana. Almost everyone who bought it has already lost money, and there's 80 percent of the token still left to dump.
The worst part is all the money that's flowed into all these other coins created on Solana. You've got all these people who are now stuck in confirmation bias and don't even realize that, in the simplest terms, the technology behind Solana is basically a copy of Ethereum. They changed a few things, and then almost everything you're using that you think is on Solana is actually built back on big tech. The websites, the databases, everything except the actual token transactions is built on big tech, and the Solana blockchain itself is hardly doing anything. If you go to some of the Solana explorers, they artificially inflate their TPS with a bunch of vote transactions.
All the Solana shillers will tell you how great it is because of how much TVL and how many active users it has, but we know those things are very easy to fake. Plus Solana's market cap is so high right now that it's right about the same level it was at when it got rug pulled before. To me, there's no real value here.
Meme coins are everything I hate about crypto
I saw someone in the chat say someone they know made $1,000 profit with $500. Here's the thing about everyone trading meme coins, and I've posted this on X: you're just ripping each other off. You're playing a game of musical chairs with money, where the last person who is a fool holding on loses everything, and the person who does the least research and makes the poorest decisions gets ripped off the most. Meme coin trading is everything I hate about crypto.
I got into crypto to try to support technology that could give us a better financial system than you and I having to go through governments and banks, which have almost no accountability for what they do with our money. They fund wars and all kinds of destruction, and we're almost powerless to do much about it. Not totally, but it's difficult. And yet with people trading all these Solana meme coins, I could actually argue that government currencies are better than XRP and Solana, because at least there are some people who are accountable for what's happening in government currencies, and at least there are some rules and regulations in place.
In my opinion, Solana and XRP are two of the absolute worst cheaters, liars, thieves, and manipulators in crypto, and that's why there's so little transparency about who's behind these projects beyond the few people who are the public face. XRP had only a few hundred new developers for the entire year last year, which is terrible. And the only reason almost anyone built on Solana is, one, they didn't know there was any better option available technologically. Most people, once they find ICP and build on it, say "wow, this is way better, I'm never building anywhere else." And two, Solana paid so many people to integrate its tech. It's a flywheel, and I believe it's all going to come crashing down again. In the meantime it has sucked massive amounts of money out of investing in real innovation and technology that actually makes the world a better place. If you want to go deeper on how I think about all of this, I share more in my Money playlist.