ALGO vs XRP in 2017: Algorand's $3B USDC and $29,000 Fee Gap

Algo trades under 10 cents right now and just like XRP, its goal is to become the rails real money moves on. Circle's dollar already runs on it and one of Europe's biggest trading firms now offers it to institutions around the clock. So, people have been saying one ALGO can hit $1 and that buying it now could be like buying XRP on April 1st of 2017 before it went from 2 to $3.84. And in dollars, it's close because the whole ALGO market is worth about $873 million. Almost what all of XRP was worth that exact day.

But in the first half of the year, $3 billion in stable coins moved across Algarand and the whole network collected about $29,000 in fees for carrying it. And on July 29th, Algo hit the lowest price in its history. That's why on October 11th, with Algo at 12.4, we said on the channel, if you want some ALGO, probably buy it slowly while it's quiet, not on the day in the news. By the end of October, it was near 9.6. So, if you're holding any coin, betting on the banker coin story like XRP, HAR, XLM, or Quant, watch this because that $29,000 tells you whether all that traffic ever turns into a higher price for the coin and whose pocket it lands in first.

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All right, bull runners. I'm Ryan Huggin, aka at WinW with Ryan. Welcome back to the channel. To see why that 2017 comparison is trickier than it sounds, you have to go back to how Algo started. Algo was started by Sylvia Macalli, an MIT professor who won the Turning Award, which is basically the Nobel Prize for computer science.

And in 2019, it launched as the chain that was supposed to fix everything wrong with crypto. It sold its first coins at $2.40 in June of 2019 and hit its all-time high of $3.56 the very next day. So, Algo already had its hype top. It launched right at the peak. And like most coins that launched in 2019 with most of their supply still locked, it crashed about 94% in 3 months as new coins kept unlocking.

Anyone who bought near that top is still down more than 97%. At $1, ALGO would only be worth about $9 billion, around 10 times its end of October price, and it already traded above a dollar in its first week back in 2019. The bad news kept coming in 2026, too, because the Algorand Foundation cut a quarter of its staff in March. Algo set its new all-time low in July, and right after a new CEO took over at the end of August, the chief technology officer and the head of strategy and marketing both resigned within about 6 weeks. That's the strongest case against ALGO and a lot of holders have already given up on it, which is a fair reaction to five years of watching it bleed since its 2021 high.

What that case misses is that that thing that crushed ALGO in 2019 is mostly gone. Back then, fewer than 1 in 20 of the 10 billion coins traded. So, a sliver set the price while the rest kept arriving for years. And today about 91% of all ALGO that will ever exist is already out there. The rules change too because the SEC's guidance on March 17th listed ALGO as a digital commodity, which is the label that every coin in America wants and most of them still don't have.

The network also kept working through all of it. And the people using it in 2026 aren't crypto tourists. Remember that $3 billion that crossed Algarand in the first half of the year? All of it was USDC. the stable coin circle issues and June alone set a record at $751 million. In August, Flow Traders, one of the biggest trading firms in Europe, started offering ALGO to institutions around the clock.

And the use most people have never heard of is the UN refugee agency, which has paid more than $35 million to over $625,000 Afghans returning home through Hezab Pay, a payments app that runs on Algarand. In October, the stable coins sitting on Algarand jumped from about 49 million to about 107 million. And nobody has named who brought them. Some of the newest traffic doesn't even come from people. In October, 115 teams finished a contest by putting tools live on Algarand that AI agents pay for in USDC, one request at a time, which is exactly the kind of tiny payment a bank account was never built to handle.

So, the usage is real. And the problem is what the network charges for it. A basic transaction on Algarand cost 1,000th of an algo, which at a price of near 10 cents means about 10,000 transactions pay a combined $1. Over the first half of 2026, the network processed 233 million transactions and collected about 277,000 ALGO and fees, which is that $29,000. That's about $160 a day for a network moving billions.

And the dollars on it belong to Circle. So all of that traffic only ever needs a few crumbs of ALGO to pay its fees. Meanwhile, people who stake ALGO were paid about 40 million ALGO in rewards over those same 6 months. So the fees covered less than 1% of it. And the foundation's own report still lists accounts it uses for structured selling.

The new CEO, William Herkwrath, talked about flipping that on Algoran's own show in September.

We need to shift that narrative. We need to find a way to to make us net buyers rather than net sellers.

Earlier in the same episode, the host, the foundation's marketing chief, until he resigned in October 14th, asked how the foundation stays alive without selling ALGO because at some point it can't keep selling. How do we ensure that the foundation uh becomes sustainable uh without having to um uh sell algos which at some point we cannot do anymore.

So the people running Algorand know exactly where the gap is and closing it is the whole job for the next few years. Until they do the real question is whether buying Algo here is anything like buying XRP in 2017. On April 1st, 2017, XRP traded at about two cents and the whole thing was worth about $818 million, right where Algo sits right now. By January 7th, 2018, XRP was worth about $130 billion, around 160 times more. And that's the move people have in mind when they think they make the 2017 comparison.

What usually gets left out is that XRP wasn't doing it alone because the entire crypto market went from$26 billion to more than 800 billion in that same stretch about 30 times over. XRP was also one of the first coins with a real bank story then. And in 2026, Algo is one of dozens of coins with the same pitch. So, it doesn't get noticed just for showing up the way XRP did. So the 2017 math only works if the whole market gets a wave like that again and Algo would need something of its own to stand out once it does.

The thing that Algarand bets itself on is the quantum computer because a big enough one could crack the signatures that protect most crypto wallets today including bitcoins, ethereums and XRPs. Algoran has been signing part of its system with quantum resistant cryptography since 2022 and in August it let regular users open quantum resistant accounts. Harkle Wrath told Yahoo Finance in October why he won't wait.

So folks tell me quantum resistance isn't our number one problem. We have this AI threat. This is where all we're we're stressed out about it. And then my response to them is simply well why do it twice? And the companies that used to ignore him now come to Algarand on their own.

People who didn't really care too much are picking up our phone calls now. Um,

Algarand's head of product went further on October 27th and called quantum migration security debt that grows every quarter. Nobody fixes it. Algoran's core system isn't fully quantum proof yet and its own roadmap aims for broad protection by the end of 2027. Still, if Quantum Fear ever becomes a headline, the whole market trades on, Algoran is one of the few chains that already ships something. And that's the one real edge it has over coins it gets compared to.

If you hold XRP, that race matters to you, too, because Algarand's own explainer video now cites an outside ranking that puts Algarand a tier above XRP on quantum readiness. And that's the kind of claim XRP will have to answer one day.

Algarand is ranked tier A for postquantum readiness by tectonic, placing it ahead of most major blockchains.

So in dollars, Algo is the size XRP was on April 1st, 2017. But it's one of dozens of coins with that bank story now. And it still has to prove people need to buy the coin. So what would $1 actually take? Algo at $1 would be worth $9 billion.

And that's still only about a ninth of what XRP was worth at the end of October. Getting back to that old high of $356 would take about 37 times. And matching XRP's end of October market cap would need about $8.74 in Algorand, which is more than double the best price it has ever printed. So $1 needs about a 10x with the whole market behind it. and flipping XRP needs ALGO to more than double the best day that it ever had. So, there are three things that we are watching on ALGO from here.

The first is whether the foundation goes from net seller to net buyer because that's the only version of this story where all that traffic finally reaches the coin. So, we're keeping an eye on that structured selling line in its reports. The second is who brought those new stable coins in October? Because $58 million showing up in a month with no name attached could be a big client testing the water or one trader moving money around. The third is whether the quantum upgrade ships by the end of 2027.

Because if Algoran's core goes quantum resistance while the fear grows, the edge becomes real. And if the deadline slips, the edge shrinks with it. Algoran's own product team says some estimates put a computer like that as early as 2029. So the end of 2027 is the date that we've got circled. Until then, the bigger question is how much room a coin like ALGO should get in your plan at all.

The 2017 play was simple. Buy the cheapest bank coin you can find and forget about it. And in a market lifting everything 30 times, it worked. A coin under 10 cents isn't automatically cheap, though, and Algo's own history proves it. Now that we're into November, Algo was down about 46% over the past year and XRP about half.

So, this is a market for building slowly and keeping cash ready. And people who put everything into one coin in a year like this usually spend the next one waiting to get it back to even. Pick the size before you pick the entry. So, ALGO stays a small piece of a portfolio built from coins that do different jobs. Spread your buys over quiet days like the one that we flagged back in October and then set your takerit price before the next wave starts because nobody can tell you how long a run lasts.

Algo and XRP also fell together over the past year. So, holding both spreads your risk less than it looks. and the rest of the plan should hold coins doing completely different job. And if this cycle does turn into a 2017 style wave, the people who do the best will be the ones who were spread across a few coins before it started. That's exactly why a coin like Algo only ever gets a small slice of the plan. However good the 2017 story sounds, and it's why we made the call we did on it last month.

On October 11th, while Algo Videos called for $1, we told you to take a look at it and get into it slowly and not on the day it's in the news. And it's down more than 20 cents then. And that was financial education, not financial advice. If you ever bought a coin because it was cheap per coin and called early and then watched it fall another 20%, it's usually because you were shown the 2017 chart without the $29,000 fee bill underneath it. That fee number never makes the thumbnail and you can't dig through every report on every coin by yourself.

Inside the private intelligence network we run, our research team goes through reports like the one that we showed you that $29,000 before we make any call on a coin. And members see the levels that we watch weeks before a video goes live on the YouTube channel. We also have weekly live coaching on how big a position could be and when if not to take profit. And members learn to keep their coins in their own wallets instead of leaving them on an exchange. And they do all of this in a group of other serious investors who've stopped chasing cheap coins and started building portfolios that can survive a bad year.

When the next coin under 10 cents gets called the new XRP, the people who come out ahead will be the ones who checked what the network earns before they decided how much it gets. Every new member in our system gets one-on-one time with our coaches, so we only take a small number each month. Click the first link in the description below. Watch the free briefing and if it makes sense, book a call and then we'll go through what you hold and we'll tell you whether we can help you or not. And as always, you know what to do.

Stay bullish.