The Centralized Banker 'Token' Ripple is crashing hard after seeing an all time high last week. Ripple peaked around $3.84 last week but has seen almost a 55% drop in value since its all time high.
Ripple's pump over the last month has many speculating on why the 'token' which has no utility rose from pennies to nearly $4.
The most likely scenario is that new money in the cryptocurrency market saw Ripple as a cheap 'token' that had potential to break out as the new Bitcoin. That's how Ripple is being marketed to new money on websites and youtube that target people with little experience in the cryptocurrency space.
Ripple is a centralized 'token' that has no use case. There is zero reason to believe the banks are going to use Ripple to transact. Moreover, last week a panel of bankers admitted that Ripple is currently not being used at all by any of the collective banks.
Ripple was pre-mined by Jed McCaleb that was also the founder of Mt. Gox exchange before selling it to Mark Karpeles which eventually ran the company into oblivion after reported a million Bitcoins went missing. The value today 10 January 2018 of the 'lost' coins is over $7 billion dollars.
Meanwhile, McCaleb left Ripple to start another 'token' digital currency, Stellar.
Stellar is a fork of Ripple and should be treated with equal distrust and skepticism from smart money. The moral of the story is to stay away from the centralized tokens or coins, they have no value in the space of decentralized cryptocurrencies unless you want to merely speculate on tokens that are created by the same individuals that cryptocurrencies were created to cripple.