If You Bought $100 of XRP and Ethereum in 2015, Here’s What You’d Have Now

Ethereum and XRP were tiny, speculative crypto bets in 2015, with coins being sold for far less than a dollar. Back then, even a small $100 purchase of either would net hundreds or thousands of tokens, but skepticism kept a lot of people away. Now, years later, the coins are worth way more, and a simple $100 investment would have risen by thousands of percent, though the two coins arrived at that outcome in very different ways. Using CoinMarketCap’s historical snapshots and current market data, Wealthier Today runs the numbers to show just how dramatic early-crypto returns can be.

Ethereum: From Under $1 To A Four-Figure Asset

On 2015-07-07, CoinMarketCap shows Ethereum trading at $0.00958 per coin. This means that a $100 purchase at that price would have bought about 10,438 ETH ($100 ÷ $0.00958). As of 2026-06-23, Ethereum is trading around $1,656.44 per coin on CoinGecko, after a recent pullback in a broader risk-off crypto market. That means those 10,438 ETH would be worth roughly $17.28 million today. This works out to a gain of about a 17,286,000% run from the original $100 stake, or roughly 172,860x.

Interestingly, the Ethereum price is more than 66% down from its all-time high price of $4,900, which means that depending on what point in time you look at it, the $100 in Ethereum could be worth more. At the altcoin’s market peak back in August 2025, the 10,438 tokens gotten from a $100 investment in 2015 would be worth more than $50 million.

Ethereum’s 2015 entry point was especially powerful because it started from a near-zero base. The network launched in 2015, but later grew to become the core settlement layer for DeFi, NFTs, stablecoins, and a large share of on-chain activity.

However, the upside was not linear as the figures above make it look. Ethereum went through multiple boom-and-bust cycles, including the 2017 ICO surge, the 2021 bull market, and the 2022–2023 drawdown before recovering again. For example, the price went from around $1,400 back in 2018 to less than $100 in 2020, meaning anyone holding since 2015 would have had to endure drastic downturns over the course of 10 years to reach its peak.

XRP: The Smaller Starter Price And The Slower Climber

XRP also traded at a tiny fraction of a dollar in 2015. CoinMarketCap’s 2015-07-07 snapshot shows XRP at $0.00958 per token, meaning a $100 purchase would likewise have bought about 10,438 XRP, similar to Ethereum. But the growth trajectory of both digital assets has been very different, with XRP lagging well behind.

Using the same current-price reference of about $1.10 to $1.16 from CoinMarketCap, that stake would be worth roughly $11,482 to $12,113 today. Using a midpoint current price of $1.13, the position would be worth about $11,799. This implies a gain of around 11,700% to 12,100%, or roughly 118x to 121x, depending on the exact live price used.

The data above shows that Ethereum has been the better-performing asset of the two, but this is not without reason. XRP’s upside has been constrained by a different history and use cases. The parent company, Ripple, was locked in a prolonged legal battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for five years. The regulator had sued the company with claims that the sale of XRP counted as the sale of an unregistered security, and Ripple fought back.

After five long years, the legal battle ended in 2025, but the damage was already done. XRP’s price stalled throughout the 2020-2021 bull market, failing to reach a new all-time high while the likes of Ethereum skyrocketed. Even so, XRP’s long-run gain is still substantial. A five-figure return on a $100 buy is no small feat. It simply looks small next to Ethereum’s explosive move from penny-level pricing to a multi-thousand-dollar network asset.