Early XRP investors are enjoying an extraordinary return on investment—almost 400-fold based on today’s prices.
XRP has been around for nearly 13 years, and its price performance has been impressive. The XRP Ledger launched in June 2012 with a total supply of 100 billion XRP tokens. However, the popular price-tracking platform, CoinMarketCap, began tracking XRP’s price in August 2013.
At that time, XRP was the third-largest crypto asset, trailing only Bitcoin and Litecoin—Ethereum hadn’t even launched yet. Notably, XRP traded as low as $0.005882 back then.
What $1,000 Invested in XRP 13 Years Ago Is Worth Today
Since then, XRP’s value has surged, reaching an all-time high of $3.84 in 2018. Before hitting that peak, XRP also saw a significant dip to an all-time low of $0.002802 in July 2014.
As of today, XRP is trading at $2.20. An investor who bought $1,000 worth of XRP in 2013, when it was trading at $0.005882, would have acquired approximately 170,010 XRP tokens.
Remarkably, this amount would currently place the holder among the top 0.5% of XRP’s wealthiest investors. For context, only 31,878 accounts hold 100,000 or more XRP tokens out of the 6.37 million active XRP wallets.
At today’s value, that $1,000 investment would be worth approximately $374,022—a staggering 373x return over just 13 years. Meanwhile, at XRP’s all-time high of $3.84, that same investment would have been worth $652,829. This highlights just how profitable early XRP investments have been.
Would $1,000 Have Done Better in Bitcoin?
While these XRP gains are impressive, they pale in comparison to the returns from early Bitcoin investments.
At Bitcoin’s current price of $84,125, investors who bought in during its earliest days when BTC traded for as little as $0.058 have seen returns of 136,057,545%.
To put this in perspective, a $1,000 investment in Bitcoin at $0.05816 would have purchased 17,193 BTC. At today’s price, that portfolio would now be worth a jaw-dropping $1,446,440,852—nearly $1.5 billion.
Given Bitcoin’s performance, XRP investors remain hopeful. Enthusiasts frequently speculate about a future where 1 XRP could be worth as much as $10,000. In such a scenario, even someone holding just 100 tokens would become a millionaire—at least hypothetically.