Raiblocks has the community behind it, and has gone up over 100% in the last week. will it be be to keep this growth up?
In the last 24 hours alone, RaiBlocks have gone up over 80%, making the cryptocurrency the 17th most valuable cryptocurrency with a market cap of a little under $3 billion now.
All of this growth has come despite the fact that Raiblocks can only be traded on three relatively small exchanges including Mercatox. Backers are hoping that once it gets picked up by more of the large exchanges it will explode even more.
Why RaiBlocks could keep going
It solves a major crypto problem
Bitcoins biggest problem is that it can't keep up with the sheer volume of transactions, as it's limited to how many it can process at a time. This results in transaction times that can take hours and have fees of up to $15. As a result, it has meant that Bitcoin is becoming an unviable currency to use to make purchases.
RaiBlocks focuses on these issues with near instant transactions and zero fees. It does this by being the kind of anti-Bitcoin, with individual blockchains rather than one large blockchain based network.
In RaiBlocks, each account has its own blockchain, and each block that is sent through that has just the one transaction. When you send XRB, two transactions are required - a send transaction that deducts the balance from the sender and a receive confirmation by the recipient. Think of it like the two ticks you see when you send a WhatsApp - the one tick when you have sent it, and the second tick when your recipient confirms it has received the message.
To avoid needing to use a wider blockchain network to verify transactions, RaiBlocks sends need to reference the previous transaction of the owner's block.
It's only on three tiny exchanges
RailBlocks is currently listed on only three tiny exchanges, with the majority of its trading occurring through BitGrail. This means that it has limited, to no exposure to most cryptocurrency buyers, and it's actually quite impressive it has managed to reach where it has without any of that.
It's also harder to buy it on those exchanges than the big guys. None of those exchanges currently deal with any fiat currency, meaning you need to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum on another exchange with fiat and then transfer that to your BitGrail exchange wallet to buy.
It's currently leading a vote on popular exchange Binance to be the next currency listed on the exchange. If it managed to be listed on Binance, it would both make it much easier to invest in and also open it up to a whole new market.
How big could RaiBlocks get?
Since it finished its faucet in November, meaning no more free RaiBlocks, XRB has been skyrocketing. Again, this despite just being on a few tiny exchanges. It's price is currenly $US21, and is growing rapidly.
Its longer term growth is hard to work out as it relies on more people and businesses adopting its technology to become viable. However in the short term, as it becomes more popular and bigger exchanges start to pick it up we should see it hit its true value - which could be anywhere around $30.
It also wouldn't be surprising to see XRB's market cap hit US$4 billion and push it inside the top 15.
This article should not be interpreted as a recommendation to invest. As an investment class, cryptocurrencies are speculative investments and investing in cryptocurrencies involves significant risks – they are highly volatile, vulnerable to hacking and capital loss and sensitive to secondary activity. Historic performance is no guarantee of future returns. Before investing you should obtain advice and decide whether the potential return outweighs the risks.