During the course of the week digital currency markets have seen colossal gains and one crypto asset, in particular, XRP, has jumped significantly in value over the last seven days. The distributed ledger token XRP climbed 25% upwards on Tuesday alone, and seven-day price stats show the coin has gained 123% as well.
At the time of publication, XRP is currently swapping for $0.677 per coin as it gained more than 25% during the early morning (ET) trading sessions on Tuesday. The coin holds the third-largest market valuation today with a current liquid market cap at around $22.55 billion.
The market cap gives the XRP token a 4.02% dominance index rating out of the value from all the crypto assets in existence today ($563.91B). The XRP token price has more than quadrupled during the course of the year.
There is currently a supply of 45,348,221,180 XRP in circulation today and there’s been around $11 billion in reported XRP trade volume during the last 24 hours.
One of the primary reasons for XRP’s current spike stems from the project the Flare Network, which plans to airdrop tokens to XRP owners. This means more than 45 billion “spark” tokens will be given to XRP holders who are holding anytime before December 12, 2020.
XRP is seeing a majority of trades on Binance, Upbit, Huobi Global, and Coinbase Pro. XRP still has a ways to go to catch up to the digital asset’s all-time high recorded on January 3, 2018, at $3.30 per XRP. Many bitcoiners and cryptocurrency advocates dislike XRP and consider the project a very centralized operation no different than traditional databases.
Despite this criticism, XRP fans think the token will continue to rise because the project is bank-friendly and claims to be working with over 350 financial institutions. Unlike bitcoin (BTC), the distributed ledger’s consensus is managed by XRP’s independent servers.
On November 23, XRP settled over 981,000 transactions in 24 hours which is well above (180% larger) BTC’s 350,000 average transactions per day. While confirmation times for BTC can be over 10 minutes or hours depending on the mempool backlog, XRP transactions settle in five seconds.
Even though a few of these benefits are appealing to some users, bitcoiners detest XRP for creating 100 billion tokens at launch. Lots of crypto advocates think XRP goes against the very nature of decentralized cryptocurrencies and many users won’t go near the token.
Meanwhile, the fork of XRP, stellar XLM has also seen massive gains this week as well climbing 54% in value during the last 24 hours. XLM which was created by one of XRP’s cofounders Jed McCaleb has spiked over 93% this week, and 103% during the last 30 days.
What do you think about XRP climbing the cryptocurrency charts and gaining value against the USD? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
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