Ripple (XRP) has overtaken Ethereum as the largest alternative currency by market capitalization in a sudden increase that has divided the cryptocurrency community.
After the token of the payment network reached up to $ 2.65 in some exchanges this week, investors are celebrating the returns that have reached 1,000 percent in just three weeks. At the beginning of December, XRP was trading at only $ 0.24.
Multiple alternative currencies have had astronomical gains towards the end of this year since the own increase of Bitcoin gave rise to the behavior of imitation that registered new historical maximums for assets like Monero, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
However, with a market capitalization of $ 91 billion, at the time of Saturday's edition, it is XRP that has stolen the Ethereum show, which currently has a market capitalization of $ 68 billion. Meanwhile, Bitcoin's overall market capitalization has sunk to new historical lows below 38 percent.
The reasons for Ripple's increase revolve around new partnerships with traditional finance, institutions that want to take advantage of their technology to reduce costs and save time.
However, despite their new successes, the Bitcoin figures seem more worn than ever, highlighting the centralized structure of the project and the comparative absence of use cases for XRP compared to the platform itself.
"Here there is a clear price difference between the (past) and the (future)," BitFury CEO George Kikvadze said on Twitter on Friday.
"Ripple - Centralized solution; Trust in one company - is it worth $ 100 billion?
Bitcoin - Decentralized solution; Confidence in Mathematics and Cryptography - Is it worth $ 235 billion?
Here there is an obvious bad assessment between the PAST and the FUTURE. "
Popular personality WhalePanda meanwhile went further, comparing Ripple's ethos in terms of bonafide Blockchain qualities to notorious MMM scheme OneCoin.
The venture capitalist Chris Burniske and the Blockchain technologist, Preston Byrne, also expressed concern about the growth rate of XRP.