Ripple’s XRP coin price is rising so quickly that the sudden price movement is really starting to rouse snoozing crypto-enthusiasts.
At the time of writing XRP is up 100% over the last seven days and Friday, September 21, XRP shot to a peak of $0.76 before dropping back. During that time XRP suddenly knocked Ethereum’s ETH from its long-held second place position by market capitalization.
Today XRP is back in third place by market capitalization, but there is less than $2 billion in market capitalization between XRP and ETH, so next week could prove interesting for both coins and investors.
What is Fueling Ripple’s Price Rise?
Ripple’s blockchain use-case is predominantly focused on real-time gross settlements, currency exchange, and remittances. As one of the most viable blockchains for immediate adoption into financial infrastructure, Ripple gained early partnerships with major banks to develop blockchain-based financial infrastructure.
Despite being an early development in the world of blockchain, Ripple has struggled in 2018 along with the rest of the cryptocurrency market. Ripple has been fighting court cases over “securities” offerings as well as a major dispute with the R3 Consortium which promised to deliver more key banking relationships and didn’t. Ripple hasn’t had an easy year so far, seeing a roughly 80% price decline for its XRP coin.
It does seem, however, that the tide is turning for Ripple. The price of XRP has rocketed, potentially on news of more banking partnerships and the possible release of its xRapid product.
xRapid – Wider Adoption for Ripple?
Ripple says that 120 banks and financial organizations are currently using, testing, or otherwise involved with its xCurrent product, which is used to confirm cross-border transactions between banks. xCurrent exchanges messages and confirmations between banks but does not use the XRP coin in the transactions.
xRapid is a progression of this blockchain development designed by Ripple Labs to use Ripple’s XRP coin as a “bridge” to speed up cross-border transactions. With xRapid, a fiat balance would be converted to XRP before being sent cross-border and converted back into the new fiat currency of choice on receipt.
xRapid hasn’t yet been tested by banks but has been trialed by money transfer companies Western Union and MoneyGram. Ripple’s Sagar Sarbhai, head of regulatory relations for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, has recently suggested xRapid could be launched commercially “in the next month or so.” Making the launch a possibility for October or November.
Suggested Reading : Learn how to buy Ripple here.
New Partnerships
Three cryptocurrency exchanges have reportedly already agreed to use xRapid to send remittances, Bittrex, Bitso, and Coins.ph.
Cory Johnson, Chief Market Strategist at Ripple speaking in August said:
“We’ve seen several successful xRapid pilots already, and as we move the product from beta to production later this year, these exchange partners will allow us to provide financial institutions with the comfort and assurance that their payments will move seamlessly between different currencies.”
The latest bank to partner with Ripple for xCurrent is the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, which has 5 million users worldwide and sent 37 billion dollars in outbound remittances in 2016.
Ripple also signed a partnership with Chinese e-commerce giant Lian Lian International in February to use xCurrent in its systems including cross-border remittances, potentially opening up access for Ripple to the largest e-commerce market in the world – China.
A Wikipedia Pilot
Outside of the xCurrent and xRapid projects, Wikipedia is trialing the XRP coin as a way for readers to reward contributors using Coil. Wikipedia’s Coil partnership will allow website visitors to donate a small amount of cryptocurrency to content creators and XRP has been tested as a potential, viable option.
Ripple is Faster Than Any Other Platform
After recent system updates, Ripple’s transaction processing speed is now faster than Visa and any other transaction processing platform in the world. A significant achievement, the Ripple blockchain can now process up to 50,000 transactions per second. Visa currently handles 24,000. This speed could also spur adoption for xRapid.
As a key development by Ripple, if utilized widely, xRapid would increase the volume of XRP currency transactions considerably. This may now be impacting the price of XRP off the back of news of the anticipated launch.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse made healthy predictions for xRapid speaking to CNBC in June:
“I’ve publicly stated that by the end of this year I have every confidence that major banks will use xRapid as a liquidity tool. You know, by the end of next year, I would certainly hope that we would see you know in the order of… dozens.”
“Dozens” of banks using XRP day to day could lead to significant price gains for the coin.
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