The Best Cryptocurrency to Buy If You Already Own XRP

The market is increasingly treating crypto infrastructure as a barbell: one leg for institutional settlement rails, the other for speculative throughput and fee capture. The second-order implication is that the real competitive battlefield is not just token price appreciation, but where the economic rent accrues — to the settlement layer, the exchange layer, or the token holder. Hyperliquid’s burn design makes it closer to an equity-like claim on transaction flow than a “network utility” token, which is why it can attract capital even from investors already exposed to XRP’s institutional adoption thesis.

The hidden winner set is the surrounding ecosystem: market makers, on-chain brokerage wrappers, custodians, and ETF/vehicle issuers that monetize volatility without taking protocol risk. If perpetuals continue migrating on-chain, centralized exchanges face fee compression first, then retention pressure as power users arbitrage between venues. That creates a path for smaller, faster brokers and prime-service providers to gain share even if HYPE itself is volatile; the underlying trade is not only token adoption but the migration of derivatives plumbing away from legacy venues.

The main risk is that this is still a duration trade disguised as a usage trade. Fee generation is impressive, but if competitive intensity forces rebate wars or lower take rates, burn economics can deteriorate faster than headline volume suggests. Time horizon matters: the next 1-3 months are likely dominated by ETF/flow momentum, while the 6-18 month outcome depends on whether perpetuals remain a differentiated product or become commoditized by CEXs and brokerages entering the stack.

Consensus may be underestimating how correlated these assets are in a broader crypto drawdown: both are “institutional adoption” expressions, just through different microstructures. The diversification case only holds if capital keeps rotating between settlement and leverage narratives; in a risk-off regime, both can de-rate together. The better contrarian angle is to favor the picks-and-shovels around crypto market structure over the tokens themselves if volatility stays elevated.