Among the top cryptos, XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) and Solana (CRYPTO:SOL) are currently separated by a single position, ranking sixth and seventh, respectively. But both coins have ranked much higher before.
XRP climbed as high as third during its 2025 rally to $3.65, and Solana reached fourth in early 2025 when it traded near $260. This year’s market-wide downturn pulled both down, dragging XRP from third to sixth and Solana from fourth to seventh. With Solana now slowly creeping back up, could it overtake XRP in the crypto rankings?
Solana Is More Than $20 Billion Behind XRP
XRP is the bigger coin by a clear margin right now. Its market cap is around $70 billion, while Solana’s is closer to $47 billion, leaving a gap of about $23 billion between them. This is where it gets interesting, because XRP trades at just over $1 while Solana trades near $76.
Solana’s price is roughly 70 times higher, yet XRP is still the bigger coin. The reason is supply. There are about 62 billion XRP in circulation against only 580 million Solana, so even at a dollar, the XRP coins add up to more than Solana’s total.
To close that gap, Solana would need to climb roughly 49%, from about $76 to around $113, assuming XRP stays where it is. That sounds like a long way, but the race is closer than it looks. Because Solana’s market cap is smaller, it takes less new money to move its price the same distance.
A smaller coin climbs the rankings on less fuel, so a $23 billion gap can close faster than the raw number suggests. The main question is what would pull that much money into Solana.
Solana Handles Far More Activity Than XRP
The two coins offer completely different utilities. XRP powers Ripple’s cross-border payment network, moving money between banks and financial firms across more than 90 countries. Solana, on the other hand, is one of the fastest and cheapest blockchains to use, which is why millions of people run their crypto trading, DeFi, and memecoin activity on it every day.
That difference shows up the moment you look at usage, and it isn’t close. Solana records around 3.3 million active addresses a day, while the XRP Ledger records somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000. That’s well over a hundred times more people using Solana on any given day, and the same gap runs through almost every measure of real activity.
Solana processes close to 300 million transactions a day, against the XRP Ledger’s 1.7 million. It holds more than $5 billion in its DeFi apps, the part of crypto where people lend, borrow, and trade without a bank in the middle, while the XRP Ledger holds about $38 million. And since the start of the year, Solana has earned roughly $36.7 million in fees from all that activity, which is the third most of any blockchain behind Ethereum and Tron. The XRP Ledger earned about $766,000 over the same stretch.
Moreover, Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade is coming. It is already approved and now in testing, and will cut the time it takes to settle a transaction from about 12 seconds to under a fifth of a second, with a full launch expected late this year. That would make an already fast network feel almost instant.
It’s worth being honest about what a lot of that Solana activity actually is. A good chunk comes from memecoin trading and speculation rather than serious financial use, and its DeFi deposits have fallen from a peak of around $11 billion earlier this year. So the raw numbers do overstate how much of the usage is built to last. But even with that caveat, the gap is enormous, and heavy usage tends to pull in developers, money, and attention over time, which is exactly what pushes a coin up the rankings.
Why XRP Still Holds the Higher Rank
If Solana is winning almost everywhere on-chain, the obvious question is why XRP is still the bigger coin. The answer is the leve of trust from big institutions rather than everyday users.
XRP’s spot ETFs have pulled in around $1.49 billion since launching, more than Solana’s $1.14 billion. Ripple also holds close to 75 regulatory licenses around the world and works with names like Santander, SBI, and PNC.
There’s also the CLARITY Act—the bill that would let U.S. banks legally hold and move XRP—which could open the door to a wave of bank demand the moment it passes. That institutional money is the floor under XRP’s price; the reason it holds steady when the market sentiment is gripped with fear.
But the institutional lead that keeps XRP ahead is exactly what Solana is now coming for. In the same week that Bitcoin’s ETFs lost $527 million and Ethereum’s bled for the eighth week running, Solana’s ETFs still pulled in new money. Morgan Stanley has also filed for its own Solana fund at the lowest fee in the market, a sign that big names are still moving toward Solana even now. XRP’s rank rests almost entirely on owning the institutional lane, and that’s where Solana is closing in fastest.\
Can Solana Overtake XRP in 2026?
Solana can overtake XRP, and the $23 billion gap is smaller than it looks. Solana wins on usage, it needs less new money to climb because its market cap is smaller, and it’s now competing for the same institutional money XRP has relied on. That combination is what makes the gap beatable.
But it would take two things going Solana’s way. The first is a risk-on market, where traders chase fast, heavily used networks instead of hiding in the safest names. The second is Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade arriving on schedule and pulling in fresh money. In today’s market, XRP’s institutional backing would likely keep it ahead.
The key signals to watch are clear for each coin. For Solana, it’s the Alpenglow rollout and whether risk appetite returns to the market. For XRP, it’s the CLARITY Act and whether ETF money keeps flowing in.
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