Ripple Going Head-to-Head With Bitcoin: Next Crypto Craze is Coming

The second most valuable currency after Bitcoin is recognized Ripple, with a market cap of $120 billion surpassing Ethereum by $26 billion. In earlier December it was trading at 25 cents. On Wednesday the price of Ripple’s digital asset XRP jumped almost 20% to the point of $3.00. Ripple’s spike comes after hitting a low of $2 following its previous all-time-high of $2.85 on Dec. 30, 2017.

So there comes a question: what conditions causing the the San Francisco-based Ripple’s raise?

The main difference between Ripple and other digital currencies is that it uses blockchain technology to handle large volumes of transactions for banks, exchanges and other financial institutions. In case of Bitcoin it takes one or more hours to process cross-border payments, Ethereum achieves its minimum number of confirmations in several minutes, while in the matter of Ripple it takes only seconds, which makes the digital asset a good tool for real-time commerce.

Ripple, which is believed to own about 60% — or $16 billion worth — of the 100 billion XRP in existence, recently announced that it has raised $94 million from investors including IDG Capital Partners, CME Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Alphabet’s GV, formerly Google Ventures.

Earlier in December there was also an announcement about starting to process  cross-border payments using Ripple’s system by Japanese and South Korean banks.