Luke Judges urged the XRP community to “Don’t ignore Solana,” highlighting performance gaps that could shape Solana price prediction narratives. Judges cited his prior work in the Solana ecosystem — two startups and a validator with more than $30 million staked — and framed the message as a strategic warning for XRP to adopt an “execution‑first” mindset.
Judges grounded his view in operational experience. He pointed to Solana’s “pragmatism and blistering speed,” noting metrics that market participants use to evaluate layer‑1 competitiveness: roughly 2.5 million daily active users and a theoretical throughput of up to 65,000 transactions per second. By contrast, he referenced XRP’s lower daily activity, arguing that the ledger’s growth appeared limited relative to Solana’s high‑performance dApp environment.
The comment was accompanied by a call for internal change: XRP should “learn from Solana’s strengths” and accelerate throughput improvements and ecosystem incentives rather than merely replicate features. Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, is reported to have signalled evolving thinking on governance and consensus models and to be discussing expanded smart‑contract and DeFi capabilities for the XRP Ledger. Judges framed these steps as necessary to fuse XRP’s regulatory positioning and banking integrations with faster execution.
Risks, market reaction and implications for Solana price prediction
The praise for Solana carried caveats. Critics raise decentralization concerns tied to a declining validator count and the prominence of high‑volatility memecoin activity. Prominent industry voices have described parts of Solana’s ecosystem as susceptible to rapid, insider‑driven token cycles, which can amplify short‑term price swings and complicate long‑term valuation models. Tracking tools aimed at on‑chain “whale” activity have proliferated in response to those transparency concerns.
Market reaction has been mixed. Solana has attracted institutional interest — both SOL and XRP are available in futures markets on major broker platforms — and some analysts project that SOL could surpass XRP by 2030, with a range of price forecasts cited in public commentary. Other observers characterise Solana’s near‑term sentiment as deteriorating while noting stretches of flat performance for XRP, underscoring continued volatility and a dependence on adoption and product rollouts.
A public challenge from a Solana Foundation product lead proposed a “facts‑only” debate on on‑chain metrics, signalling that both networks expect a data‑driven contest for developer mindshare. For market participants, that contest translates to a simple proposition: performance and real usage will increasingly determine how price predictions settle over multi‑year horizons.
The Ripple insider’s warning reframes Solana price prediction as a function of technical execution and ecosystem traction rather than narrative alone. If XRP accelerates smart‑contract and throughput development while retaining regulatory advantages, competitive dynamics could stabilise; if not, Solana’s speed‑first model may continue to draw developers and speculative capital.
