Ripple Soars on Bank Adoption

Ripple (XRP) saw 150% gains in price last week and even overshot Ethereum as the 2^nd highest ranking cryptocurrency by market cap ($23b) for a brief while.  At the time of writing XRP was at $22.4b and Ethereum at $24.7b compared to the undisputed king, Bitcoin at $115.6b.

The rally started off as the Head of regulatory relations for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East at Ripple Sagar Sarbhai told CNBC that a commercial version of xRapid would be launched “in the next month or so”.  As we explained here back in March, xRapid is the key user of the actual cryptocurrency XRP.  Simplistically xRapid allows financial companies to facilitate immediate foreign exchange services and at up to 70% of the cost of the 40 year old, painfully slow (3 days v 2 minutes using Ripple), centralised US centric SWIFT system.  

They later released a statement saying there wasn’t an official commercial release timeline yet.  It certainly was in no way a denial and the price plateaued rather than dropped.  

In the same period we also learned that US bank PNC will begin using RippleNet to process international payments.  RippleNet uses xCurrent, which they describe as a necessary first step toward adoption of xRapid.

RippleNet is reportedly already live in 40 countries and Ripple is adding a bank every week to the service.  As tensions grow between the US and other countries, be it trade war or foreign policy induced, there is and will likely continue to grow, a reluctance to submit all foreign exchanges through the SWIFT system which sees all transactions route through New York.

Ripple’s price action during this week, on no more than early assurances of broader adoption of its technology, highlight the explosive price potential at these lows.  We wrote of the sentiment at play in crypto markets at present a few months back here.  Sentiment is a fickle thing and as this last week demonstrated, when people actually understand the value in these various applications of blockchain technology, and some trusted party reinforces broader use is near, the turn in sentiment can be swift and demonstrable.

We will talk to this a bit more in the weekly video update tomorrow but check out how well our Ainslie Intelligence AI Trading Signals picked this move in XRP below… To find out more keep an eye out for our weekly video update every Tuesday morning.