Ripple has continued its blistering price tear, confounding any notable record of inflated or exaggerated price swings known to occur among cryptocurrency markets. Ripple’s XRP token gains has seen it displace Ethereum – again – to rank behind bitcoin in the list of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.
Developed by San Francisco-based FinTech startup Ripple in 2012, the XRP token powers Ripple’s enterprise-ready public blockchain – the Ripple Consensus Ledger. Ripple was developed for the enterprise market, specifically banks, as a solution for the current global financial system. With the promise of near-instant cross-border money transfers at significantly lowered costs, a number of banks have partnered Ripple over the years. Ripple is markedly targeting an entirely different market compared to Bitcoin.
In September 2016, Ripple launched the ‘Global Payments Steering Group’ a rules-based blockchain payments network compromising of six founding banks as members
Ripple’s cryptocurrency, XRP, began its growth spike two months ago in March. Two months to the day, the value of one XRP token was 0.0062 USD, registering a market cap of just under $235 million. At the time, Ripple powered a trial of domestic money transfers between 47 Japanese banks using Ripple’s blockchain technology. By the end of March, Ripple had surged to a 2-year high (at the time) in a week where Japan’s largest bank partnered Ripple with plans to deploy global money transfers over a blockchain in 2018.
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In April, Ripple claimed to match the transactional throughput of Visa, the world’s largest payments network.
Speaking to CCN, a Ripple representative stated at the time:
Our payment channel is specifically designed for XRP and allows transaction throughput to increase to tens of thousands of transactions per second. XRP saw nearly 70K transactions with an average time of 3.7 seconds.
By April, Ripple’s token was trading at a then all-time high.
Earlier this month, Ripple surpassed Ethereum in trading numbers of their respective tokens to briefly take the second spot among cryptocurrencies. At the time, the total value of Ripple tokens in circulation chalked $8.89 billion.
Last week, Ripple’s technology chief Stefan Thomas unveiled the startup’s objective to relinquish control of validating nodes operated by Ripple to third-party operators. This is a part of a strategy toward decentralization. “A key benchmark that we aim to achieve is to become more decentralization than Bitcoin,” Thomas stated.
Since then, Ripple’s token has nearly doubled in value, as has its market cap.
At the time of publishing today, a single XRP token is valued at $0.33 USD, with a market cap reaching above $12.5 billion.
Charts from CoinmarketCap. Featured image from Shutterstock.
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