By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 19th, 2024
Turning out to be a dark horse, Ripple storms the crypto market by surging above $2.5.
It seems that nothing is going to stop Ripple (XRP) from ending the year on a high. The cryptocurrency is on an unstoppable upswing currently trading at its all-time high of $2.71 with the value surging by more than 77% in the past 24-hours according to CoinMarketCap.
The past 24-hours trading volumes are at a record high of $11 billion as Ripple has confidently surpassed the $100 billion market cap thereby adding another jewel to its crown. This altcoin is currently the second most powerful cryptocurrency by market cap overtaking Ethereum, which has been occupying this position for a long time.
Ripple is the only cryptocurrency on the charts, that is making new highs in spite of the market correcting heavily, actually turning out to be a kind of a dark horse. There is no doubt that Bitcoin has been the most popular cryptocurrency of 2017 within the investor community. However, if you look at the percentage of returns that Ripple has offered year-to-date vis-a-vis Bitcoin’s returns, the first easily overshadows the latter.
Ripple started the year of 2017 at a mere price of $0.64 and when compared to its current price, the percentage of return is more than 42,000%. While on the other hand, Bitcoin which was on a wild rally in the past two months, has slipped considerably in last 10 days and is currently trading sub $14,000 levels which turns out to be less than 1400% returns yearly.
However, when it comes to comparing market cap, Bitcoin is way ahead of Ripple. Bitcoin’s $247 billion market cap contributes to nearly 43% of the overall cryptocurrency market cap while at $105 billion, Ripple grabs 17.7% share of the overall pie.
While talking to Financial Times, Ripple’s Chief Executive Officer – Brad Garlinghouse said:
“2017 has been the year of the digital asset, and XRP has clearly outperformed every other digital asset. The reason for that is that the market has realized that XRP is a highly efficient payments mechanism that is solving real-world problems for real-world customers with real money.”
Garlinghouse further added:
“People are increasingly realizing that bitcoin is not going to be a panacea for all these payments problems that people imagined it would solve. Payments with XRP settle in a few seconds, but if you buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin it will be cold by the time the payment has been settled.”
Today, as on date, Ripple has collaborated with more than 100 financial institutions, with which it shares its blockchain-based payments technology. Ripple offers the fastest settlement time when compared to its peers and takes just 4 seconds to enable fully settled payments.
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’s. As per the company, XRP can further scale to handle Visa-level transactions.
With a path-breaking move in the past one week, it currently looks like Ripple is all set to break further records in 2018 and establish itself with a strong foothold in the cryptomarkets.