Solana's ETF debut made quite a buzz in New York this week, with a whopping $56 million in turnover on day one. This is the highest opening print out of more than 800 ETF listings this year. The debut for sure stole the spotlight with its record volume, but Ripple’s camp quickly made sure the conversation shifted back toward XRP.
Luke Judges, who runs global partnerships at RippleX, dropped the kind of line markets know how to decode.
No one needed a footnote — "the king" was XRP, the ETF still waiting on the sidelines but already being treated by analysts as the product that will bring bigger pools of liquidity and heavier institutional orders.
The XRP vs. SOL context makes the competition more intense. Western Union just announced that it is going to release a stablecoin on Solana, which is kind of surprising since Ripple's pilots have been around for years and never really took off.
Even so, XRP is entering Q4 with some tough numbers: $2.85 a coin at the end of the quarter, a market cap of over $150 billion and $364 million in tokenized real-world assets running through XRPL rails. That is adoption that translates directly into the case for an ETF.
Trying to prove which side is more correct, one can address CoinShares data, according to which $84.3 million moved into XRP products in the week of Oct. 24, lifting year-to-date inflows to $1.93 billion, with $2.61 billion under management. Solana added $29.4 million in the same week and is at $2.86 billion YTD.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team