Better Cryptocurrency to Buy Right Now: Bitcoin vs. XRP

Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) and XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) are two very different types of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, the world's top cryptocurrency, is often considered a "blue chip" coin that is less volatile than smaller altcoins. XRP, the native cryptocurrency of the Ripple payment platform, is a much smaller token that has largely traded on the drama surrounding a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit over the past four years

Over the past 12 months, Bitcoin's price jumped 134% as XRP's price rose 14%. Over the past five years, Bitcoin's price surged 487% while XRP's price climbed 116%. So is it smarter to simply stick with Bitcoin than to bet on XRPs future growth?

The differences between Bitcoin and XRP

Bitcoin is often compared to physical metals such as gold because it's digitally mined through an energy-intensive proof-of-work PoW process. Its miners use powerful ASIC chips to process calculations and earn Bitcoin rewards from its blockchain

That process gets more challenging every four years with scheduled "halvings," which reduce the rewards for mining Bitcoin by half. As of this writing, nearly 19.8 million Bitcoins (out of its maximum lifetime supply of 21 million) have already been mined. But due to the increasing difficulty of mining Bitcoin, experts don't expect the final Bitcoin to be mined until 2140. It's a tightly controlled long-term inflation policy

Bitcoin's blockchain doesn't support smart contracts or decentralized apps (dApps) like the proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains used by Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano. However, its simple approach to mining, its scarcity, and its increasing adoption for mainstream payments make it more comparable to gold, silver, and other precious metals than many other cryptocurrencies

XRP is a token that was digitally minted instead of mined. Its parent company, Ripple, minted its entire supply of 100 billion tokens prior to its market debut, and it initially locked up 55 million of those tokens in escrow accounts across its blockchain.$SOL