Ripple Skyrockets by 45% in 24 hours

Ripple’s XRP token has become a superstar among biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization this week after a strong rally pushed the price back to levels not seen since July of this year.

As of press time, Ripple’s XRP token is up about 68% for the week, making it the biggest weekly gainer among major coins.

The majority of the gains occurred during the last 24 hours, when XRP shot up more than 45%. The strong gains came with unusually high trading volume across exchanges, with the Binance exchange recording the highest trading volume on XRP/BTC since the extreme surge in price in December last year.

This week, Sagar Sarbhai, head of regulatory relations of APAC and the Middle East at Ripple, told CNBC that he’s “confident” that their product xRapid, a source of on demand liquidity, will go into commercial application soon. According to Sarbhai, more than 120 banks are currently partnered with Ripple, using its blockchain-based product xCurrent, a banking payment solution. Also, on Wednesday the company announced about a new partnership with US-based PNC Bank, the 9th biggest bank in the US by total assets.

Other explanations largely focus on the recently depressed XRP price, and that the asset has moved into “oversold” territory on several indicators used by technical analysts in the crypto market.

Fundamentally, however, one of Ripple’s main concerns has been that most banks that the company works with chooses to employ solutions that do not involve the use of the XRP token, fuelling speculations that XRP does not offer any real utility for users. In the past, Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse has defended himself against such speculation by attacking bitcoin, while claiming that XRP is “the best digital asset for settlement.”

Despite this, hardcore proponents of Ripple are not concerned, although even they acknowledge that XRP is not being used for the time being:

Meanwhile, back in August, ICO advisory firm Satis Group released a list of predictions on future prices of 10 cryptocurrencies, where Ripple’s XRP was mentioned as one of the weakest coins when looking 10 years into the future. According to the firm’s prediction, XRP will decline by 90% from current levels in just a year, while in 10 years it will have seen a decline of 99% to a price of just USD 0.004.