The value of Ripple briefly crossed $3 a token Wednesday, triggering a renewed sense of urgency among traders to tap into one of the fastest-growing altcoins on the market.
XRP/USD Price Levels
Ripple’s XRP token reached an all-time high of $3.20 early Wednesday, giving it a total market cap of nearly $123 billion. It remains second only to bitcoin among active cryptocurrencies, having recently overtaken Ethereum.
At the time of writing, XRP/USD was up 4% at $2.86. The pair has gained more than 128% over the last five days, and is up over 9,400% compared to a year ago.
Ripple’s trade volumes continue to soar, with total transactions exceeding $7.2 billion on Wednesday. That’s equivalent to 477,260 units of bitcoin. Activity remains heavily concentrated on the Korean peninsula, with the won on one side of nearly half of total trade volumes. Bitfinex processed the second-most Ripple deals, with the XRP/USD pair accounting for roughly 8.5% of the market’s daily turnover.
Other exchanges on the forefront of the XRP market include Binance, Coinone and Poloniex, according to CoinMarketCap.
XRP in Hot Demand
The fear of missing out, or FOMO, has unleashed the masses on global cryptocurrency exchanges, with traders rushing to buy XRP and other digital tokens amid the frenzy. Exchanges have demonstrated an inability to cope with such large volumes, with the likes of Bittrex, Bitfinex and CEX.io putting a temporary halt on new user accounts. Bitstamp is still accepting users, but is taking weeks to process identity verification.
It is unclear when new account signups will become available again, although Bittrex has announced that registration would resume by Jan. 15. Meanwhile, the U.K.-based CEX.io says it is still trying to deal with the “enormous” backlog of new users registered on its platform.
Coinbase continues to onboard new clientele, but does not currently offer XRP tokens. If industry sources are correct, that may soon change, as the San Francisco-based platform looks to support new cryptos. Coinbase is highly selective about which coins get included on its GDAX exchange. Currently, the platform supports only bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and bitcoin cash.
Ripple’s official website lists Bistamp, Kraken, Gatehub, Coinone, Bitso, Coincheck, Korbit, Qryptos, Bitbank, Bitsane, BTC Markets, LiteBit, Bitcoin Co Ltd. and BItcoin.co.id as exchanges that support the digital currency.
XRP has gone through the stratosphere over the past month on broad institutional support for the XRP protocol. Ripple is sometimes referred to as the bankers’ cryptocurrency for its ability to streamline cross-border payments.
Source: Hacked