Ripple Price: XRP just hit its highest price ever
Ripple surges to a new all-time high, overtaking Ethereum as the second biggest crypto.
Ripple has hit $US2.69, its highest price ever, pushing its market cap to US$100 billion for the first time. The news come right on the heels of our breaking story that Bitcoin's market cap share has dropped 50% in the last 30 days.
List of exchanges that allow you to buy Ripple
The cryptocurrency has also regained its spot as the second biggest cryptocurrency based on market cap after Ethereum briefly regained that position yesterday. It's currently holding a US$17 billion lead over Ethereum's market cap.
Why is Ripple's price going up?
This is the second big rise of Ripple we've seen in the last week.
Ripple's potential relies on whether it can get banks and financial institutions on board to replace the old SWIFT system which is currently used by banks for international transactions. Ripple can process transactions much faster and cheaper than SWIFT, processing in seconds – not days – and with far lower fees.
Just last week, Ripple announced that it's creating a consortium in Asia to look into the role distributed ledger technologies such as Ripple can play in card payments. This consortium has already developed technology which enables payments through Ripple using phone numbers or QR codes.
Asian businesses appear to be responding, with 75 large groups already signed up to support Ripple. 15 of the world's top 50 banks have also worked with Ripple in some form.
The spike over the last 24 hours is likely a delayed result of this in the Western markets, as more mainstream media started to pick it up. While the majority of trading for Ripple in the first surge last week came from South Korean exchanges, much more of it in the last 48 hours was from exchanges in the US and Europe as local media started to talk about Ripple as "the next bitcoin".
Yesterday there were also leaks that allegedly showed that Ripple would be the next currency to be added to crypto broker and exchange Coinbase.
If rumours of Coinbase and other mainstream cryptocurrency brokers picking up XRP are true, we could continue to see the price rise at a decent pace. Likewise, if more banks continue to partner with Ripple for international transactions and it starts to take over from SWIFT it might spike even further.
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