Wednesday was yet another huge day for Ripple as its price leaped by 65% in less than 17 hours. Currently, Ripple holds the number #4 spot with an insane $27 billion market cap lead over Litecoin, and just $10 billion away from Bitcoin Cash in the third spot
Ripple, denoted as XRP on exchanges, had an impressive rally last week after hovering around the $0.20 mark for almost 7 months. With an explosive growth of over 300%, XRP surged to become the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, boasting a price tag of $0.88 at one point. Over the next few days, Ripple went through a period of consolidation and its price fluctuated between $0.70 and $0.80 for about a week.
Throughout this timeframe, the XRP market was fairly steady, with no major price swings. Even when Coinbase announced that they will be adding Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to their offerings, which lowered the price of Bitcoin (BTC) and several other cryptocurrencies in the market, Ripple’s price remained unaffected.
The Second Jump 
SOURCE: CoinMarketCap
As shown in the graph above, at 2:24 PM (PST) Dec. 20, Ripple was priced at $0.75. Fast forward 17 hours later, at 7:04 AM (PST) Dec. 21, Ripple’s price tag went up to $1.24, crossing the “historical” $1 mark in style. This 65% growth gives Ripple the boost it needed to push past the resistance level of $0.80 and soar past the $1 milestone right before 2018.
At the time of writing, XRP’s price resides at $1.16.
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What is Ripple?
This might come as a shock to most people, but Ripple is actually older than Bitcoin, although it wasn’t released until 2012. The very first version of the company was created in 2004, according to Bitcoin Magazine. The original idea was implemented by Ryan Fugger with the intention of creating a monetary system that was “decentralized and could effectively empower individuals and communities to create their own money”.
Because of that, the Ripple cryptocurrency has been adopted by several major banks and financial institutions. Banks like Standard Chartered, Bank of America, SEB in Sweden and MUFG in Japan all implement Ripple because they believe in the system that Ripple offers, which is more secure than other cryptocurrencies and at a much lower fee. In essence, by adopting Ripple, these banks will be able to allow users to send, receive, and hold any currency in a decentralized way via the Ripple network.
But the real game-changer is Ripple’s liquidity. In an interview with Fortune earlier this year, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said:
“The liquidity needs of banks today is managed with literally ten trillion of float that sits in these nostro and vostro accounts. We believe very strongly this is an inefficient model. You can use digital assets to fund liquidity, and Ripple is uniquely positioned to capitalize on that. Bitcoin takes four hours to settle a transaction. XRP takes 3.6 seconds.”
