Ripple News Update
After days of backsliding, Ripple prices finally stabilized on Thursday and climbed on Friday morning. It was the first sliver of hope investors had seen in a week.
Unlike most price moves, we can trace this one back to a single announcement: Ripple’s partnership with Moneygram International Inc (NASDAQ:MGI), a leading provider of remittance services.
For many immigrants living abroad, sending money back to their countries of origin is a tedious task with unnecessarily high fees. It also happens to be a significant chunk of cross-border payments, which is Ripple’s specialty.
Put another way, this is a match made in heaven.
The icing on the cake is that MoneyGram will use “XRapid,” a product that makes use of XRP tokens. Until now, many of the company’s partnerships had made use of the blockchain, but not XRP, which critics pointed to as a flaw in our investment thesis.
However, we remained confident that more clients would ultimately see the value in XRP as a liquidity tool. It appears that MoneyGram will at least give that product a fighting chance.
This news sent Ripple prices soaring 18.4% against the U.S. dollar. It brought the XRP to USD exchange rate back up to $2.07, which I imagine is a relief to many XRP “hodlers.”
It was a sweet end to a bitter week.
South Korea’s awkward handling of cryptocurrency regulations led to a massive sell-off in days past, precipitated by another Korea-related incident. I speak, of course, about CoinMarketCap’s decision to exclude Korea’s exchanges from its price calculations.
However, I reminded readers earlier in the week that XRP is not materially damaged so long as its fundamentals are intact. And those seemed in perfect working condition. So the slump looked more like a buying opportunity to me than anything else.
Today’s Ripple news illustrates my point quite succinctly.
brad tweet
Analyst Take
As Ripple continues to expand its customer base, I expect XRP to accelerate toward our Ripple price prediction of $10.00.
