Over the past 24 hours, Ripple has overtaken Bitcoin Cash to become the third largest cryptocurrency behind bitcoin and Ethereum, with a staggering $51 billion market valuation.
Why Did Ripple Surge in Value?
Earlier today, the entire cryptocurrency market experienced a major correction, as nearly every cryptocurrency in the market with the exception of a few declined in value by more than 10 percent. Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin have declined by around 11 percent.
While other cryptocurrencies fell in value and struggled to maintain momentum, the Ripple price surged by 7 percent, which is noteworthy because most of the cryptocurrencies have declined in value by large margins. In fact, out of the top 20 cryptocurrencies in the market, Ripple remains as the only cryptocurrency to record a daily gain.
Daily price trend of top 20 cryptocurrencies in the market
Analysts have attributed the recent surge in the price of Ripple to the newly formed partnership between SBI Holdings and major credit card companies in Japan. SBI Holdings is a large-scale financial service company in Japan that operate a variety of businesses such as banks and schools. SBI Ripple Asia, a joint venture created by SBI Holdings and Ripple, created a consortium of Japanese credit card companies to test, implement, and deploy blockchain-based solutions of Ripple.
“We are going to invest in the ecosystem to both help accelerate the adoption of Ripple’s technology,” said Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse on CNBC’s Squawk Alley. “One of the things we all have to remember is the value of a token over the long term is really going to be driven by its utility. There’s no question there’s a lot of hype in this system.”
At the time of reporting, more than 100 financial institutions are utilizing the Ripple network to process international payments and peer-to-peer transactions with lower costs. Several banks such as SEB, one of Sweden’s largest banks, have been using Ripple to settle hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions for high-profile clients.
In October, Ripple revealed that France’s Crédit Agricole, Brazil’s Bexs Banco and Uruguay’s dLocal have partnered with the company to implement Ripple’s blockchain technologies. FT also reported that SEB transferred $180 million on the Ripple network.
“It also said that SEB, the Swedish bank, had used Ripple’s system to transfer $180m between Sweden and the US in recent months to help manage the cash balances of one of the bank’s large corporate customers.”
South Korea’s Role
Yesterday, on December 27, CCN reported that the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange market is pushing the price of cryptocurrencies concentrated in the South Korean market in terms of daily trading volume with substantially high premiums.
Ripple is one of the few cryptocurrencies concentrated in the South Korean market, and investors have become increasingly optimistic in regards to Ripple’s long-term growth trend given the partnership between South Korean banks and Japanese banks to process payments on the Ripple blockchain network.
If Ripple continues to add more banks and large-scale financial institutions on its network, the transaction volume and user activity of the Ripple blockchain will further increase, driving its price upwards.