For the second time this week, the Ripple price has achieved a new all-time high at $1.52, surging by more than 15 percent overnight and obtaining a market cap of $59 billion.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the $70 billion market valuation of Uber dropped by $20 billion over a period of 24 hours after SoftBank, Japan’s largest technology investment firm, acquired a 20 percent stake in Uber, valuing the company at $50 billion.
Having established a new all-time high, Ripple is now bigger than both Uber and Didi Chuxing, two of the largest technology startups in the global market with a market cap of above $50 billion.
Ophir Gottlieb, the CEO at Capital Market Labs, a member of Thomson Reuters First Call Institutional Research, stated that the price of Ripple is increasing at a rapid rate due to its potential in regions like South Korea and Japan wherein large-scale financial institutions, banks, and credit card companies have already adopted the blockchain-based technologies of Ripple.
Ripple surpassing the market valuation of Ripple can be easily justified said Gottlieb, emphasizing the larger market Ripple can penetrate into than Uber.
“Ripple’s total addressable market is $5 trillion a day in trans-country currency exchange (currently on SWIFT), or over a quadrillion dollars a year. Ripple the technology (not necessary the digital currency) is a much bigger idea than Uber,” Gottlieb explained.
But, it is also difficult and inaccurate to justify a market valuation of a currency purely based on total addressable market, because RIpple is yet to process even small fraction of the transaction volume of the global finance and currency exchange market, while Uber has been dominating the car sharing market for many years.
More to that, if the market valuation of any cryptocurrency can be justified by total addressable market, bitcoin’s market cap can be in the trillions as of now, given that it is the $40 trillion offshore banking industry, $8 trillion gold market, and the global fiat currency system it is attempting to replace.
Ripple’s Connections
While it is not fair and accurate to justify Ripple’s market cap based on its potential and total addressable market, it can be said that its connections and partnerships with some 90 banks in Japan and South Korea can justify its recent price increase.
Previously, CCN reported that major Japanese financial institution SBI Holdings and its joint venture firm with RIpple SBI Ripple Asia have formed a consortium of credit card companies that will implement Ripple’s technologies in the upcoming months.
“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.”
CCN also revealed that Ripple has settled $180 million in payments for the Swedish bank SEB, processing cross-border payments for high profile clients.
If Ripple can build a client base of leading banks and settle billions of dollars worth of payments on a daily basis, its price and market valuation as a payments firm will further increase from its current levels.