Ripple Price Hits New All-Time High, Overtaking Ethereum as the World’s No. 2 Cryptocurrency

| Updated
by Bhushan Akolkar · 3 min read
Ripple Price Hits New All-Time High, Overtaking Ethereum as the World’s No. 2 Cryptocurrency
Photo: Ripple

A huge surge in buying interest of Ripple has taken the cryptocurrency at the number two spot on the crypto charts.

Ripple (XRP) has been on a crazy ride as the value of cryptocurrency has surged by a 100% in the past seven days itself. Today, this altcoin has set one new record to its journey as for a time, the cryptocurrency’s overall market cap crossed that of Ethereum making Ripple as the second-most valued coin on the charts after Bitcoin.

According to the data from CoinMarketCap, Ripple was trading at an all-time high of $1.90 precisely on 11:04:00 UTC on Dec. 20, 2017 i.e. today. At this time, the market cap of Ripple crossed $73.5 billion leaving Ethereum behind who has been occupying the number two spot for quite a long time now. Currently, at the press time, the cryptocurrency is trading at $1.70.

Bitcoin still remains as one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap contributing 41.5% of the overall crypto market valuation, while Ripple, on the other hand, contributes 12.4% and Ethereum which is now on the third spot contributes 12.3%.

One of the major reasons attributed to the surge in Ripple’s price over the past one month is the testing of Ripple technology by some Japanese and South Korean banks. This news itself has fueled a lot of buying interest amongst investors and the daily volumes are shooting record highs.

Moreover, two-days back, Tokyo-based SBI Ripple Asia created in January 2016 – founded by Japanese financial services firm SBI Holdings and Ripple announced the formation of a “consortium” with some Japanese credit card companies to use the revolutionary blockchain technology.

Apart from Japan, a huge rush of investors to buy Ripple is seen on the South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges wherein the altcoin was also seen trading at a premium price over its value on other exchanges.

While talking to CNBC about the future plans, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said: “We are going to invest in the ecosystem to both help accelerate the adoption of Ripple’s technology. “One of the things we all have to remember is the value of a token over the long term is really going to be driven by its utility. There’s no question there’s a lot of hype in this system.”

Rippe is basically a San-Franciso-based blockchain startup that makes use of the blockchain technology in order to develop payments network for banks, financial institutions, and other digital asset exchanges. All the network participants will use Ripple’s own digital coin famously known as XRP for transactions.

Ripple’s test results show that in a vis-a-vis comparison to other cryptocurrencies, Ripple offers the fastest settlement time which is just four seconds. While on the other hand, Ethereum network takes about two minutes to complete a transaction and Bitcoin takes over half an hour as mentioned on Ripple’s website.

Moreover, the Ripple network is robust enough to handle scalability issues with ease. As claimed by the company, XRP can handle over 1500 transactions per-second, 24 x 7 for all weeks of the year. This is nearly 100 times more than Ether transaction per second and 250 times more than Bitcoin transactions per second. As per the company, XRP can further scale to handle Visa-level transactions.

Currently, more than 100 financial institutions are said to be using the Ripple network.

Altcoin News, Cryptocurrency News, News
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