It’s so far so good for Ripple post-US tax season it seems, with the cryptocurrency climbing from ~$0.65 USD last Monday morning (April 17, 2018) to a high of nearly $0.93 USD by Saturday (April 21, 2018). As of writing this, the price was down to around $0.81 USD. While this may seem minor compared to it’s all-time high of $3.65 USD in January, this is still a jump of nearly 50% in just over a week, which is more than many of the other cryptocurrencies can currently boast.
Many enthusiasts are currently waiting to see whether XRP will finally succeed in breaking the $1.00 USD mark again. Of course, the increase in price of Ripple in particular over the others isn’t fully explained at this time, although there are a couple of honorable mentions that could have influenced the current price:
- Banco Santander, one of the main banks in Spain, has revealed their plans to release a new app, One Pay FX, connected to Apple Pay, which will enable users to make international monetary transactions by means of Ripple (April 17, 2018) – see the official document here.
- Billionaire Mathew Mellon passes away and makes headlines as it is revealed that XRP his investment of $2 Million USD appreciated to $1 Billion USD (which is about 2.5% of Ripples current market cap (April 17, 2018).
- Ripple encourages UK legislators to emplace ICO and cruptocurrency guidelines in place to protect investors. While this might seem small, it could to a lot for their PR in terms of promoting themselves as a legitimate cryptocurrency and blockchain platform (April 17, 2018).
- Gary Gensler, a former high-ranking financial regulator during the Obama administration and former partner at Goldman Sachs, recently drew attention to the cryptocurrency by mentioning his strong belief that Ripple should be listed as a security (April 22, 2018).
- Five money transfer companies announce their intent to test Ripple’s API protocol, xVia (April 26, 2018)
Some older news that you might not have known, that will likely lead to further Ripple price increases in the long-term:
- The Siam Commercial Bank, one of Thailand’s largest commercial banks, declared an interest in looking into integrating some of its services into the Ripple blockchain (January 10, 2018).
- MoneyGram announced that it would allow for XRP payments through Ripple’s xRapid app, which would offer much lower transfer fees and faster transfer times than other cryptocurrency payment options available through the service (January 11, 2018).
- 61 Japanese banks formed a consortium to gradually adopt Ripple’s XRP payment app, ‘MoneyTap’, which will likely lead to even greater implementation of the already popular cryptocurrency in the Japanese market (March 6, 2018).
- Ripple joins Hyperledger’s consortium (March 28, 2018).
- SBI Virtual Currencies, which is a new Japanese cryptocurrency exchange platform launched by SBI Holdings, announced that it would be exclusively listing XRP during its initial launch (April 11, 2018).