Ripple's crazy bull run continues. Today for the first time Ripple surpassed Etherium to claim the number 2 spot. The current price hovers around 2,15$ per unit and the buying is mostly fueled by the South Korean traders, who don't really care that they are paying over 30% Premium per coin. You can see in the chart below that on Bithumb (The most popular South Korean Exchange) the price is 2,46$
Paying 20-30 % premium on every coin has to suck. But then again - with this rally in crypto, how high is high enough.
After we consider that XRP is a 84B project now and it is 1/3 of the value of Bitcoin - it makes me think. Do people really want decentralization or they just want a better and cheaper system. If that is the case XRP is a very good improvement to the current banking system - Ripple is almost free to use, instant transactions, centralized, taxable and controllable.
South Korea goes hard on Bitcoin users and will demand names for transactions
Is it possible the South Korean market to shift from BTC into XRP, because the government has pledged to tighten things around crypto's. Ripple being the "bankers coin" by design might be the alternative. I guess we can only speculate.
Conclusion
Ripple had a market cap of 8B and I thought that it is so overvalued, now it is worth 10x more. The problem is not with the valuation, but with the fact that one of the best projects out there - Etherium has a smaller market cap than XRP. Now that may not be for long, maybe tomorrow ETH will hit 10,000$ - it is possible for all I know.
The real question here is - What would the masses want ? A far better alternative to the current status quo or a totally changed world that decentralization offers. I guess we will have to wait and see.
