CME Group Inc.
07/25/2025 | Press release | Archived content
XRP, ETH and SOL Surge as Passage of GENIUS Bill Boosts Investor Confidence
On July 18, the GENIUS Act became law, outlining a legal and regulatory framework for stablecoins for the first time. While this particular legislation is fairly narrow, focusing on coins with a 1:1 relationship with the U.S. dollar (USD), its passage coincided with a sharp rally among certain cryptocurrencies, notably XRP, ether (ETH) and Solana (SOL). Bringing stablecoins within the regulatory framework is a major boost for their wider adoption and appears to have boosted investor optimism regarding the prospects for adjacent cryptocurrencies that could be used to facilitate their development. In addition to the GENIUS Act, the CLARITY Act also passed the House of Representatives and is working its way through the Senate. If enacted, it could offer additional transparency on the legal classification of digital assets, jurisdictional authority and could outline the requirements for coin issuers and intermediaries as well as introducing additional consumer protections which might boost the use of currencies like ETH and SOL that focus on DeFi (decentralized finance) apps and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
XRP and ETH prices are up nearly 60% while SOL prices have gained nearly 30% before giving up a portion of their gains. Among the major crypto assets, bitcoin (BTC) has been a bit of a laggard but still managed to hit a new record high earlier this month following a 10% rally since the end of June (Figure 1). What distinguishes ETH, SOL and XRP from BTC is their use case. BTC is used primarily as a store of value, whereas the other three currencies' respective platforms could play a crucial role in the development of stablecoins.
Figure 1: XRP and ETH prices have been soaring with the enactment of the GENIUS Act into law
Why ETH and XRP have outperformed
Of the various cryptocurrencies, XRP is the one with the strongest links to the banking system since it's used to facilitate cross-border payments, especially for financial institutions looking to bridge fiat currencies. As such, it's not too surprising that it has been the main beneficiary of the new legislation.
ETH has been a close second. ETH is the currency of the Ethereum smart contract network and can be used to develop DeFi apps as well as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and Web3 development. SOL has similar use cases to ETH but with faster throughput and lower cost.
Although it may be used to facilitate payments, bitcoin's principle use case is as a (volatile) store of value that is prized for its scarcity. There will only ever be 21 million BTC, of which 19.5 million have already been created. Moreover, validating trades on the bitcoin blockchain requires proof of work, which involves tremendous numbers of calculations and relatively high costs. As a result, the bitcoin blockchain can only process around seven trades per second, and it often takes between 10 to 60 minutes for a trade to be completed. This contrasts with the other crypto assets, which require proof of stake (ETH), proof of history (SOL) or have their own unique set of validators (XRP) (Figure 2).
Figure 2: The various crypto assets have different creation processes and use cases
| Crypto Asset | Ripple (XRP) | Bitcoin (BTC) | Solana (SOL) | Ethereum (ETH) |
| Consensus | A set of tusted nodes, called validators on the unique node list, validate transactions; escrow-based release. | Proof of Work (PoW) | Proof of History (PoH) + Proof of Stake (PoS) | PoS (Since Ethereum 2.0) |
| Creation Process | 100 billion tokens Pre-Mined | Mining rewards | Staking rewards | Staking rewards |
| Speed in Transactions per Second (TPS) | ~ 1500 | ~7 | Claims 65000 but usually closer to 2000 to 4000 | Claims 30000 but closer to 15. |
| Finality Time | ~ 4 seconds | 10 to 60 minutes | ~ 5 seconds | 1 to 5 minutes |
| Energy Use | Low | High (energy intensive) | Low | Lower (after 2022 PoW to PoS switch) |
| Use case / Value Proposition | Cross-border payments, especially for financial institutions such as banks seeking to bridge fiat currencies efficiently | Digital gold/store of value/decentralized currency. Valued for security and scarcity, | High performance decentralized apps & DeFi similar to ETH but with with faster throughput and lower cost. | Smart contracts, de centralized applications (DeFi, NFTs, Web3 development) |
| Coin Cap | 100 billion tokens Pre-Mined | 21 million | No cap | No cap |
| Money Supply Growth Mechanism | Supply limited to 100 billion pre-mined tokens of which 80 billion were gifted to Ripple Labs which periodically releases the coins though sales geared towards maintaining market stability. No new XRP can be mined. Currently Ripple holds 38 billion coins in escrow of which 12 billion are offered onto the market each year. | Currently more than 19 million of bitcoin exist and money supply growth has slowed to 1.5% per annum following the latest quadrennial halving in April 2024. | Decreasing issuance to incentivize network participation an security. Coin creation was 8% initiialy and decreases 15% per year, aiming for a long-term rate of 1.5%. Currently solana money supply growth stands at 4.69%) | Ethereum can theoretically grow by up to 18 million coins annually but in reality it has never exceeded 5-6 million new coins per annum. |
Source: Investopedia XRP, Bitcoin, Ether and Solana
For ETH and SOL, there is no limit to coin supply, while for XRP 100 billion tokens were pre-mined, of which 38 billion are still held in escrow with up to 12 billion available for release each year. This gives the Ethereum, Solana and XRP Ledger blockchains much lower trading costs than the Bitcoin blockchain, and they can process transactions much more quickly, at around 1-5 minutes for Ethereum , approximately five seconds for Solana, and four seconds for XRPL. That makes processing transactions 400-500x faster than for bitcoin and perhaps 30-40x faster than with ETH.
The high and variable cost of transacting on the bitcoin blockchain might explain why bitcoin prices are not rising as fast as they once were. It now takes over 100 trillion calculations to create a new bitcoin as a result of bitcoin's energy-intensive proof of work coin creation and trade validation system (Figure 3). And perhaps because of the slow pace of trade validation (only seven transactions per second and a 10-to-60-minute wait for confirmation), the number of transactions per day hasn't risen much since 2016. Basically, the Bitcoin blockchain is operating at capacity. In the early days of bitcoin, when the number of transactions per day was rising exponentially, bitcoin prices rose exponentially as well. Since early 2017, the number of trades per day has been stagnant, indicating that bitcoin's user base may have stopped growing as well (Figure 4).
Figure 3: 120 trillion calculations are needed to mint a new bitcoin
Figure 4: The number of transactions per day in the bitcoin blockchain has stagnated since 2016
Finally, the cost of transacting on the Bitcoin blockchain, as measured by miners' revenue per transaction, has been highly variable. As of mid-July, one must pay roughly $120 to the miners in order to have a transaction validated when transacting on the bitcoin blockchain itself. In the past, spikes in transaction costs have often coincided with subsequent bear markets in bitcoin prices, some of which have taken prices down by between 70% and 93% (Figure 5). Miners' revenue per transaction, however, is not currently close to record highs, but it is something to watch, even for those in ETH, SOL and XRP given their positive correlation to BTC. If BTC corrects, it could take the other crypto assets down with it. In the event of a BTC bear market, XRP might be an outperformer given that it has the weakest correlations among the crypto group (Figure 6).
Figure 5: Bitcoin has suffered bear markets following past spikes in miners' revenue per transaction
Figure 6: XRP has weaker correlations to other crypto assets than BTC, ETH and SOL
It is also notable that as crypto assets have become more mainstream and more formal legal frameworks are being formed around them, their level of volatility has been decreasing (Figure 7). There is, of course, no guarantee that their volatility will continue to decline in the future.
Figure 7: Realized volatility has been declining recently for crypto assets
What is clear is that as the crypto world matures and formal legal frameworks are beginning to form governing the crypto space, there is a potential for diversification away from bitcoin and towards crypto assets like ETH, SOL and XRP that have more explicit use cases than bitcoin.
Trading Cryptos
Enjoy greater capital efficiency in crypto-trading through better price discovery in a transparent and liquid futures market.
Find out more
Erik Norland Economic Research Product Information Article Cryptocurrencies Bitcoin Ether Other Solana
All examples in this report are hypothetical interpretations of situations and are used for explanation purposes only. The views in this report reflect solely those of the author and not necessarily those of CME Group or its affiliated institutions. This report and the information herein should not be considered investment advice or the results of actual market experience.
CME Group Inc. published this content on July 25, 2025, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on September 09, 2025 at 14:36 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]