Ripple, although being a centralized payment system, can turn out to be valuable in the long term if there's enough use cases for it in the mainstream world. Now, all we've seen are partnerships and a lot of hype, but it could take off in value as it proves its use case in the real world. Ripple has announced the Xpring initiative which could help spread further adoption of the "XRP" token. This could bring some traction to XRP, although being a centralized "crypto" is what kills it.

Eventually, decentralized cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin will gain greater popularity and acceptance among individuals in the mainstream world. If ETH is compared against XRP in terms of security and reliability, then ETH wins by a long shot. Also, ETH has many advanced features that will allow it to be continuously demanded by people for years to come. The "Ether" cryptocurrency itself is useful since it can be used to execute any smart contract which operates on the Ethereum blockchain. With the wealth of tokens available on the ETH chain, and a lot of support from startups and businesses, Ethereum could easily go higher than Ripple itself. Just my thoughts